The Social Science Research Network has become an incredibly important part of legal scholarship. Hundreds (thousands?) of law professors publish working papers online at SSRN, which sends out email notices of new papers to subscribers and also offers a reasonably powerful search engine for exploring the archives. These days, much of my professional reading and research is done through SSRN rather than the traditional law reviews, in large part because the law review publication process is so slow (it can often take 6 months to a year between the time an article accepted and when it is published; shockingly, sometimes it can take even longer). Law reviews are reacting in a couple of ways. Some are requiring authors to remove an article from SSRN when it is accepted; this phenomenon seems especially widespread among top tier journals. These journals have very lucrative contracts with Lexis and/or Westlaw, pursuant to which the final article, as published, is archived in their databases. Apparently Lexis and Westlaw perceive SSRN as a competitor and pressure the law reviews. Yet, as Dan Hunter showed in a widely- disseminated ope n letter to the California Law Review, this argument is bogus:
The subscribers to online legal databases are largely confined to law firms and law schools. Since law schools have free access to these services, then the only meaningful market for commercial legal databases is in law firms. The articles on SSRN are in pdf format and therefore not fulltext searchable, and moreover they are generally preliminary drafts. Your argument therefore is that practicing attorneys will spend hours searching through the SSRN database for unfinished articles in preference to the easily- searchable, published version on the commercial databases. Even given the ridiculous sums charged by these providers, it is entirely implausible that SSRN competes with Westlaw/Lexis/Hein in this market.
Interestingly, law reviews at schools below the first tier recently have struck out in a different direction. On May 27th, I posted an article, Ablois hing LLC Veil Piercing to SSRN. In the intervening two weeks, I have received two unsolicited offers of publication from good (albeit not top 30) law reviews. As it happens, this article already has found a home. Yet, I find it very interesting that at least some law reviews are now using SSRN as an early-warning system to find new articles. By then offering the author a bird in the hand, the journals may be able to induce risk averse academics (or those who need an immediate offer of publication for tenure or promotion purposes) to publish with them. It'll be interesting to see if it works. I'm doubtful that it will, since there is so much pressure on authors to at least try to land your article in a top 30 journal. Kudos to the law reviews involved, however, for some creative, out-of-the-box thinking.
