SSRN rankings and Leiter's (rank?) omission

Aided by this post at Feminist Law Professors by Ann Bartow, I see a possible controversy brewing over Brian Leiter's decision, in his most recent SSRN download calculations, to exclude my Ohio State colleague Chris Fairman's heavily downloaded paper, Fuck.  Ann's post assails the decision, and my colleague Ruth Colker sent Leiter this e-mail (which she authorized my posting):

Brian, I was shocked that, after you acknowledged the bias in favor of individuals who write in the corporate law area with respect to download counts, you then excluded from your download list the only piece that is on a civil rights related topic, and included all the corporate pieces. I have read and learned significantly from Chris Fairman's piece entitled Fuck, which will soon be published in the Cardozo Law Review.  A criteria-less exclusion of one article is empirical scholarship at its worst. Ironically, a reader of Chris' piece would have expected your actions, because law and society often overreact to the mere use of the term "fuck" without consideration of its meaning in a particular context.  I encourage you to reverse your actions and republish the list without implicitly editorializing about whether one article "deserves" its downloads.

Joyfully, Chris Fairman has himself jumped into the fray with an intriguing essay discussing this situation available here (via SSRN, of course).  Chris' new piece is entitled "Fuck and Law Faculty Rankings."  Because sequels rarely do better than the original, I doubt that this new fuck-related meta-scholarship will perform as well as Chris' first piece.  But perhaps it will still help folks figure out what the fuck to make of SSRN download counts.

Posted by DAB

UPDATE: In this post entitled Quantifying Scholarship, Neil Buchanan weighs in on the problems of relying on cite counts and/or SSRN downloads in law faculty rankings.  Especially notable is this (unsurprising?) report Neil provides in the comment section to his post: 

[A]n acquaintance from another law school called me recently and asked if I would please download all of his papers from SSRN.  His dean is making a big push to pump up their numbers.