If you have legal troubles or just need a little advice, you can now log on to the Legal Scholarship Network (LSN) and download away. It’s kind of like visiting Napster, but instead of finding MP3s of Metallica and Rage Against the Machine, you’ll have access to the works of ubiquitous legal quote machine Alan Dershowitz and Harvard law professor and perennial Supreme Court possibility Lawrence Tribe.Singing law professors? Not exactly. LSN trades in prepublication versions of law review articles, not bootleg musical recordings. And there’s no pirated material; everything is posted with the authors’ permission. In fact, authors usually submit the articles themselves. If an author balks at having his stuff on the site, it’s taken down. Additionally, all content lives on a central database, so nobody’s peeking into anyone else’s hard drive.But the concept behind LSN is still the same as Napster?making original work available over the Web for free. And Stanford law professor Bernard Black, who runs the service, predicts that online legal scholarship could eventually supplant the hoary old tradition of printed law reviews. “What’ll happen to law reviews? I honestly don’t know,” says Black. “I think the top law reviews may maintain enough of a brand name to survive. The second-tier law reviews may not, unless schools keep subsidizing them as a way to train lawyers and law students.”Black adds that LSN is an important way to circulate important legal scholarship before it goes stale. Most of the content is abstracts and early versions of papers that have been accepted by law reviews but not yet published. “This lets people outside the top schools keep in touch with the cutting-edge of legal scholarship in a way that’s otherwise hard to do, because [by the time a working paper is published in a law review] it’s already two years out of date,” he says. Bernard Hibbitts, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, is a big advocate of electronic publishing of legal scholarship. “You’re able to reach a wider audience because not everyone has access to [paid services like] Westlaw and Lexis,” says Hibbitts, who operates a legal-education portal at his university. “I’ve received a lot more feedback from things I’ve posted directly on the Web than from anything I’ve ever published.”This trend won’t necessarily be limited to the law. There’s no reason to think that the same concept at work here?sharing original thought over the Internet?can’t apply to engineers, software designers, business theorists and even vertical industry CIOs. Related content brandpost Sponsored by SAP What goes well with Viña Concha y Toro wines? Meat, fish, poultry, and SAP Viña Concha y Toro, a wine producer that distributes to more than 140 countries worldwide, paired its operation with the SAP Business Technology Platform to enhance its operation and product. By Tom Caldecott, SAP Contributor Dec 04, 2023 4 mins Digital Transformation brandpost Sponsored by Azul How to maximize ROI by choosing the right Java partner for your organization Choosing the right Java provider is a critical decision that can have a significant impact on your organization’s success. By asking the right questions and considering the total cost of ownership, you can ensure that you choose the best Java p By Scott Sellers Dec 04, 2023 5 mins Application Management brandpost Sponsored by DataStax Ask yourself: How can genAI put your content to work? Generative AI applications can readily be built against the documents, emails, meeting transcripts, and other content that knowledge workers produce as a matter of course. By Bryan Kirschner Dec 04, 2023 5 mins Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence feature The CIO’s new role: Orchestrator-in-chief CIOs have unique insight into everything that happens in a company. Some are using that insight to take on a more strategic role. By Minda Zetlin Dec 04, 2023 12 mins CIO C-Suite Business IT Alignment Podcasts Videos Resources Events SUBSCRIBE TO OUR NEWSLETTER From our editors straight to your inbox Get started by entering your email address below. Please enter a valid email address Subscribe