Probably for most law profs, taking the time to get a superior grasp on the technical facts of an important issue is bound to have diminishing returns. And that’s not true just for learning technology: it’s also true for many other things that probably won’t help convince student editors at the top journals to publish your work.

But, otoh, should any of us care if student editors at the top journals want to publish our work? Forgive me for being cynical, but the best strategy to pull that off is probably to take a central legal theory that students are exposed to in their first year casebook (I won’t name one) and either refute it or propose a slight tweak. Plus, write the cover letter on a “top” letterhead. The competitive publishing game isn’t really worth the candle if you’re serious about what you’re doing. I think we owe it to ourselves to care less about placement and — to the extent possible — we should keep placement thoughts from influencing our research practice.

In fact, imho, “good” legal scholarship demands attempts at interdisciplinary research that probably don’t “pay off” professionally. And not just w/r/t the tech issues in cyberlaw, but w/r/t contemporary theory, philosophy, the social sciences, etc. And, so I’m not misunderstood, I think there are many law profs out there that get this and do this.

Just my two cents (agreeing with James).

One is that this sort of information is hard to come by and hard for your average law professor to understand. It’s complicated here by the fact that the statute was premised on the example of DVDs and is difficult to grasp on its own terms.

A second is that even if the professor gets the technical details, the readership probably won’t, so there’s limited benefit to spelling it out in an article.

Third, I think a lot of people approach this particular subject in the following fashion: “1201 is evil. Why should I bother learning exactly *how* it is evil?”

One of the reasons for this waste may be that law profs are more rewarded for publishing than for solving problems, but I admit that that factor alone might explain what makes certain topics so attractive. Maybe it’s also a bit of a raindrop effect, where articles condense about some nucleus topic that someone whom others read has latched onto. Plus the fact that you can write endlessly about a topic when you willfully refrain from entertaining the factors that might short-circuit the discussion. (Analogous to how you can make renvoi seem like a monumental problem that bounces back and forth forever, if your hypothesis is that there isn’t a suitably-drafted choice-of-law clause that applies.) But I’m just a narrow-minded practitioner.