Fairman's article quickly became one of the most downloaded scholarly legal articles on the Internet, leading to some controversy in Brian Leiter's list of "Most Downloaded Law Faculties, 2006" because Brian Leiter chose to omit Ohio State and Emory University School of Law (where Fairman was a visiting professor) from the list.

Leiter argued that without Fairman's article, neither school would be close to the top 15.

[3] In 2009 Fairman followed up this article with the book Fuck: Word Taboo and Protecting Our First Amendment Liberties, published by Sphinx.

Fairman's primary areas of focus were civil procedure and heightened pleading.

[1] At the time of his death, Fairman's 2007 Cardozo Law Review article, "Fuck" was still classed with the 20 top downloaded works on the Social Science Research Network.