S.S.R.N. Rankings Temporarily Boost Instapundit Law Prof Above Cass Sunstein
The Social Science Research Network allows just about anybody to post a paper that can be downloaded by curious readers.
The network, created in 1994, posts about 45,000 articles a year in the areas of economic and legal scholarship, its top two subjects, the New York Times reports.
The Times article asks whether the lack of discrimination is a desirable policy. “Is it good that research that has not been reviewed by peers can be found so easily and looks just the same as gold-star approved work?” the newspaper writes.
The network is certainly a good thing for law professors who are achieving notoriety because of frequent downloads of their papers. One of them is Glenn Reynolds, a law professor at the University of Tennessee and the publisher of the Instapundit blog. Reynolds notes that he is in fifth place for downloads after falling behind Cass Sunstein, a University of Chicago law professor who is jumping to Harvard Law School.
“I was ahead,” Reynolds told the Times. “I knew I didn’t deserve to be ahead of him, but that made it all the more sweeter, if that makes sense.”
Reynolds says law professors are criticized for doing work that is too insular. “To the extent that people do start chasing download numbers, it is an incentive to careerist legal scholars to write in a way that is accessible,” he said in the Times interview. “In the past, the incentive has been to write in a way that is impenetrable.”
