More Musings on SSRN
posted by Nate Oman
Earlier today I got an email from SSRN informing me that my paper (co-authored with Cole Durham of BYU Law School) “A Century of Theory and Practice in Mormon Church-State Relations” was one of the top ten recent downloads for Law & Humanities. Frankly I was surprised, partly because it is arguably a paper on a very niche topic — church-state relations is a big deal; Mormon theory and practice much less so — but mainly because there hadn’t been a huge number of downloads for this paper. It has got me thinking about SSRN.
Prior to teaching, SSRN was my main way of following what was going on in the legal academy. Access to Westlaw took a billing code, and it was much easier to read Larry Solum’s blog and monitor SSRN. However, SSRN is not, it seems to me, really reflective of the legal academy as a whole. My sense is that those in law & economics use it heavily, but those in say law & history use it hardly at all. I wonder why this is so. Why is that certain kinds of legal discussions have move more aggressively on to SSRN than others? The appearance of my paper in the top ten for law & humanities in the last sixty days tells us as much about the presence of law & humanities on SSRN than it does about my paper. (Although don’t get me wrong; it is a great paper!)
February 11, 2007 at 12:05 pm
Posted in: Law School (Scholarship)
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Responses (2)
Alex - February 12, 2007 at 2:41 am
I would think that one of the advantages of SSRN is the ability to get your paper out in the public domain (literally, albeit electronically, “published”) while waiting to get published in print. Law and economics work is often published in peer-reviewed journals, where the publication process takes a lot longer than at law reviews. Simultaneously, many law and economics papers deal with current events in the business and corporate world (e.g. options backdating, securities class action settlements, or Rule 10b5-1) where timeliness is particularly valuable. I don’t know enough to comment about law & humanities, but if they are (1) more often published in law reviews, (2) less time-sensitive in terms of content, or (3) both, then that might explain the difference.
Daniel J. Solove - February 13, 2007 at 6:58 pm
Law & economics is prominent on SSRN probably because SSRN has an entire network for regular economics scholarship, in addition to its network for law scholarship. Therefore, it doesn’t surprise me that law & economics scholars want to share their work on SSRN, as it is used by both law and economics scholars as well as by regular economics scholars.
Perhaps one reason why legal history hasn’t taken off on SSRN is because there is not as widespread use of SSRN by regular historians. If there were a history network on SSRN, perhaps a greater culture for posting history work would develop. It would be very nice to see SSRN expand into other humanities fields.
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