The Social Science Research Network has published two new rankings of both schools and individual scholars (this will be released soon) by the total number of downloads their papers have received from the SSRN site.  As a measure of scholarly output and quality, this one has many limitations:  SSRN, for example, is utilized disproportionately by scholars working in just a few areas (corporate law, law & economics, intellectual property), and it is utilized by some schools (typically those that excel in corporate law and law & economics) more than others.  Papers that are "surveys" or "overviews" of an area often tend to have much higher levels of downloads, presumably because they attract both scholars in other fields and students. 

The rankings of downloads-per-school are here (you must be an SSRN subscriber to view this); the top 25 in total downloads in the last year (which is how the SSRN data initially appears) are as follows:

1.  Harvard University

2.  Stanford University

3.  University of Chicago

4.  Columbia University

5.  University of California, Los Angeles

6.  University of Texas, Austin

7.  George Mason University

8.  University of California, Berkeley

9.  University of Virginia

10. Yale University

11. George Washington University

12. Georgetown University

13. Vanderbilt University

14. New York University

15. University of San Diego

16. University of Pennsylvania

17. Boston University

18. University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

19. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

20. Fordham University

21. Florida State University

22. University of Bonn

23. Duke University

24. Cornell University

25.  Boston College

Note that Larry Solum’s move from San Diego to Illinois will surely change the relative rankings of those two schools.

The ranking of downloads-per-scholar will be reposted; it turns out the data on-line earlier today was actually out-of-date.  I’ll repost on it here when the new data has been processed.

Note that you can reorder the rankings by clicking on the various columns:  e.g., you can rank individuals and schools by downloads per paper; by total downloads since the inception of SSRN; and so on.  As I understand it, these rankings will also be continuously updated as papers are downloaded.