Legal Commentary

Thanks to the folks at Prawfs for allowing me to hang around a bit this month so I can blog about the Bilski decision when it finally issues. In the meantime, I thought I would revisit a commonly discussed issue - reprints and what to do with them.

For the uninitiated, reprints are copies of law review articles (just one article, not the whole issue) that professors like to send to each other. I'm getting ready to send out a batch myself in the next week. The reasons why people send out reprints are pretty clear - getting people to read (and maybe cite) your article. It has a secondary (and for some a primary) purpose of letting people know you are writing, period, which can have all sorts of reputational benefits for the author and the school.

How effective sending reprints works on the margin is debatable. By the time most articles are published, the article has long been posted on SSRN. Indeed, SSRN has a service whereby professors receive email updates with abstracts of the latest posted drafts, so the "I'm writing" signal can be sent without actually sending paper.

Then again, not everyone subscribes to SSRN lists, and few of those that do read a good chunk of the articles, and no one reads them all. After all, you have to download the article, and you can't read all of a day's articles immediately, and filing them away in email or on a hard disk is not exactly high visibility.

Furthermore, any professor writing an article that might cite your work is likely to find your article in Westlaw or Lexis. Then again, I've seen enough drafts related to topics I've written on (but not citing me) to wonder whether this is really true. (Of course, they might have just thought my input was useless).

Reprints can help solve some of both problems. They go on a bookshelf, which is a visible file that can be revisited later. Furthermore, the title might register with the recipients such that they will think of your article when they are writing their own, even if Westlaw doesn't bring it to the fore.

Now, on to the revealed preferences part of the post. Many people say they save reprints and will read them one day, but there is no empirical data on whether people actually follow through with their stated preferences. For example, I really like getting reprints from colleagues, and tell myself that I'll read them, but I only get to some few. 

The true test - the natural experiment of revealed preferences - is happening right now in my office as I pack my books. I'm separating my reprints into "move to my new office" and "throw into recycling" stacks. The stacks are in a dead heat at the moment. We'll see what the stacks look like at the end of the day, but my revealed preference seems to be that only half the reprints I get are worthy of the lie I tell myself that I might read them one day.