Legal Commentary

I posted the other day about the recent NYT article on SSRN and how it is or isn't changing legal scholarship.  There have been a number of interesting responses in the comments, and I thought I would post again here rather than joining the comments in the hopes of continuing what's been a very useful discussion (at least for me).

A number of people, including Larry Solum over at his blog, have pointed to the technical problems with SSRN, particularly with its search function.  These problems (lack of permanence, poor search function, etc) are a real problem for SSRN, but they hardly seems insurmountable.   If the only thing that keeps SSRN from supplanting law reviews is software issues, then either SSRN will have to upgrade, or some enterprising outfit will come along and come up with a more user-friendly platform.  Yahoo used to be the search engine of choice until Google came along and cleaned their clock.  If there's as much frustration with SSRN as there seems to be, there will be a lot of pressure on them to innovate.

The other point that Solum, Orin Kerr, and others have raised has to do with gatekeeping.  An article in a highly ranked journal signals to our supervisors (such as they are), colleagues, and other constituents that our article is important and worthy of citation, reward, and attention.  Of course, there's no reason that SSRN couldn't do that as well.  As Christian Turner very wisely points out, there are ways of making SSRN serve that function.  Borrowing from social networking sites like Digg.com, Turner argues that user reviews, coupled with an improved search function, could help a user find the seminal article in any particular field.  There's something to be said for that gatekeeping being done by our peers rather than by the much-maligned third-year law student.