Emerging Social Norms About SSRN
Over the weekend, I socialized with a number of law professors. Naturally, the topic of SSRN came up. I noticed an interesting response to the recent attention to SSRN’s download count statistics. Many of us are so shy about blatant…
Punitive Billing
Taco Bell employee double-swipes the credit cards of irritating customers. It is a poorly-kept and dirty secret that some lawyers engage in “punitive billing,” where a lawyer grosses up his or her hours to penalize annoying/disrespectful clients. The Taco Bell…
More Fallout From Live-Shot.com
California is moving to pass a law against Internet hunting. According to Cal. Sen. Debra Bowen, “This isn’t hunting; it’s an inhumane, over the top, pay-per-view video game using live animals for target practice….Shooting live animals over the Internet takes…
North Dakota Targets Professors With Foreign Accents
North Dakota is considering a law giving students certain rights if professors do not “speak English clearly and with good pronunciation”—and if enough students complain, stripping the professor of classroom duties. Two observations: · This is the most jingoistic proposal…
Steele on the State of Legal Education
John Steele organizes his thoughts into a thought-provoking post about the state of legal education. He concludes “Two trends that bother me: the use of citation counts and download counts as a proxy for the quality of education, and the…
Cunningham on SSRN as a Metrics Source
Larry Cunningham posted “Scholarly Profit Margins and the Legal Scholarship Network: Reflections on the Web” to SSRN. This essay deconstructs various metrics of academic/scholarly performance, including SSRN download counts. He notes several limitations of SSRN as a metric, including first…
Google AdSense Thinks This is a Site for Hunters
Google AdSense thinks this site is relevant to hunters. This is due to my prior post on the Wisconsin legislature’s efforts to regulate Internet hunting. I used the phrase “hunt,” “hunting” or hunter 12 times in that post. As a…
Moral Hazard and the Initial Public Offering
My colleague Christine Hurt wrote a paper, the Moral Hazard and the Initial Public Offering, which is now available on Westlaw at 26 cdzlr 711. You can also download an earlier version from SSRN. Christine takes a critical look at…
Live-Shot.com and the Wisconsin Legislative Response
A few weeks ago I blogged about Live-shot.com, a Texas-based website that is planning to allow a person to operate a real 30.06 gun on a platform to “hunt” animals. According to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, the operator of Live-shot.com claims…
Update on SSRN Download Counts
A few days ago, I called on SSRN to clean up their download counting procedures. In response, I had an email exchange with Gregg Gordon of SSRN, who emailed me the following (reposted with his permission): “Thank you for the…