Legal Theory Blog

Be sure to check out Paul Caron’s The Long Tail of Legal Scholarship  in the Yale L.J.’s Pocket Part.  Here’s a snippet:

Does the long tail theory apply to the market for legal scholarship? Data from Tom Smith’s ongoing research project, The Web of Law, paints legal scholarship as a hit-driven market, in contrast to the long tail theory’s predictions. Smith’s data from LexisNexis’s Shepard’s database of 385,000 articles published in 726 law reviews reveals a classic 80/20 distribution of citations in cases and other law review articles: the top 17% of articles get 79% of all citations. The head of the tail is enormous, as the top 0.5% of articles get 18% of all citations, and the top 5.2% of articles get 50% of all citations. The tail ends abruptly, as 40% of articles are never cited at all.

and a bit more:

Perhaps the variance between Smith’s results and Anderson’s predictions exists only because citations are an inapt measure of the long tail. I previously have cataloged the many objections to the use of citation counts. Citations reflect one particular end-use of an article; they do not measure how many times an article is read but not cited by a judge or professor. Moreover, citation counts ignore the vast audience for legal scholarship beyond jurists and academics (such as practicing lawyers, students, and librarians). A better measure would focus on the consumption, rather than the end use, of legal scholarship.

And finally:

As the SSRN data show, the hits are now receiving fewer downloads, while the tail is receiving more. As Larry Solum has suggested, we should welcome this shift:

[T]he many hundreds or thousands of law review articles with only a few readers each may cumulatively have many readers—the proverbial “long tail.” And this “long tail” is important—because it signals the importance of microaudiences and microcommunities of scholars. It would be a mistake to believe that a flourishing legal academy could or should produce only “hits” with broad appeal both in and out of the academy. Work that reaches only a few in the short run may come to have a big impact in the long run. Work on narrow topics may nonetheless make a substantial contribution to knowledge about the law and its foundations.

Much work remains to be done to understand the implications of the long tail theory on legal scholarship. Tom Smith’s continuing research on the application of network theory to law, and the long-range project on the evolution of legal scholarship by Funmi Arewa, Ken Dau-Schmidt, Bill Henderson, and Andy Morriss, will undoubtedly offer many insights on the market for legal scholarship.