The Power of SSRN

Imagine that twenty years ago I was writing a paper on an important and pressing public issue. What could I do with that paper to make a difference? The answer was basically nothing. I could have tried emailing it to journalists, elected officials, or other scholars, but the odds that anyone would read the draft and respond were very low. Even if someone did, that would not get the draft into circulation. At best, I could write only a summary or an abstract for, say, a magazine or newspaper. 

Today. of course, you can make the entire draft ready whenever you want. That's a huge change. Baude and Paulsen's paper on Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment could not have had anything like the same influence in 2003. Only a published article could have done that.

UPDATE: Orin Kerr points out that SSRN did exist in 2003. What’s funny is that I didn’t know that then and I didn’t know that now. Shows you why my career developed slowly.