I participate in an email list called “Cyberprofs” (teachers and scholars of the law relating to cyberspace). As part of a long discussion on how SSRN affects scholarship, we decided to start an “open source” distributed law review article. The utterly ridiculous results are available on the An Academic Experiment blog. As you can see, law professors as a class have too much time on their hands and too much snark in their veins. Behind the humor, though, there’s a hint of the philosophical divide among cyberprofs — the “exceptionalists,” who think cyberspace is something ontologically different than the brick-and-mortar world, and the “anti-exceptionalists,” who think of the Internet in more instrumentalist terms.
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