I’ve been thinking a lot about the way technology can influence the path of the law – in terms of both judging and scholarship.

For example, the introduction of electronic legal databases like Westlaw has almost certainly changed how judges function.  They may be more reliant on clerks today than they used to be, because the sheer accessibility of so much relevant case information requires assistance to sift through.  I also wonder if precedent – rather than inductive or explicitly policy-based reasoning – has become more important (or is at least given greater emphasis) because of the ease with which earlier caselaw can be located.

Over at Prawfs, they’re discussing Judge Posner and the ethics of independent judicial factual research – something that technology has made far easier for judges to do.

Here at BizLawProf, we’ve talked about the relevance of law reviews in a world where SSRN can make articles immediately available (not to mention a world where law professors can, you know, umm, blog).

A number of law professors post articles to SSRN that aren’t articles so much as they are a form of advocacy – legal briefs, after a fashion, intended to sway a deliberations on a particular issue under judicial or political consideration, in situations where an amicus brief may not be procedurally appropriate or possible.  (And sometimes professors just post straight-up legal briefs).  Such postings could herald a shift in the law professors’ role – or at least a shift in emphasis – by allowing professors to influence policy outside of traditional channels.

But there’s another aspect of SSRN’s technology that I think may turn out to be critically influential in the long run.

Every morning I have email delivered to my inbox that tells me about new postings in a variety of areas related to corporate and securities regulation.  And of those articles, about half come from law professors – and the other half come from business professors.  High theory articles are presented to me side by side with in-the-weeds empirical analysis of how slight changes in, say, CEO compensation packages result in slight changes in shareholder returns or discretionary accruals.

This mode of presentation, I think, is necessarily destined to influence legal scholarship – notwithstanding the laments of those who think the academy has gone too far in the direction of “law and.”  The architecture of SSRN – and its method of categorizing articles by general subject and without regard for field, method, or source – represents a nonneutral argument about what scholars should be thinking about, should be considering, when they conduct their research.  And it will be interesting to see where that ultimately takes us.