“My Own Theory Of The Law” Has Been Exiled To The SSRN “Privately Available” Wasteland

November 27th, 2012

This morning I received the following email from SSRN about my timely and important article following up on Orin Kerr’s “Theory of Law”

Based on criteria set by SSRN, your submission currently does not qualify for public availability as we are unable to determine the merits of scholarly research. If you would like the abstract available for public viewing, please upload a PDF file of the full-text document so that we can make a better determination.

Thank you,
SSRN Management

What does “privately available” mean?

his section contains papers that are not displayed on your Author Page unless the “Include on Author Page” checkbox is checked. They are not available in the public SSRN eLibrary or to the SSRN search engine due to an author request, submission restriction (e.g. restricted conference), or SSRN policy (e.g. paper is an opinion/advocacy paper or is not a scholarly research paper covered by one of SSRN´s networks). If you want a private paper to display in the “Other Papers” section on your SSRN Author Page and as a result be searchable by external search engines (such as Google), click the paper´s “Include on Author Page” checkbox below (if available). Downloads of these papers are not included in computing the total downloads shown on your author page.

In other words, the 500 downloads of this article–the lifeblood of my academic existence!–have now been swept away into the ether.

I will not take this short-sightedness and cabined view of profound scholarship sitting down (never mind, it is tough to type while standing up)!

I have now posted a revised version of “My Own Theory of the Law” that meets SSRN’s strict criteria. I assure you that this argument is supported by the strongest foundation of legal precedents (see Footnote 1). You can download it here.