SSRN Legal Scholarship Network: working papers before the journals

The Legal Scholarship Network on SSRN is a free preprint server where law professors post papers before or alongside journal publication, and most can be downloaded without paying. It is a privately owned commercial platform (owned by a major academic publisher), though the reading is free; a few papers are posted on behalf of print publishers and carry a fee, marked with a dollar sign. Anyone can upload, but SSRN staff review a paper before it is posted. The value is speed: you meet an argument months before it appears in a law review, and the abstracts are searchable by topic. Treat a working paper as work in progress, because authors often change it before publication.

Citation: 'Legal Scholarship Network' (SSRN) https://www.ssrn.com/lsn/index.html; 'SSRN: Legal Scholarship Network' (University of Windsor Law Library) https://www.uwindsor.ca/law/library/node/244 both accessed 18 October 2026.