Info/Law

I had a powerful reminder yesterday morning of the capacity of legal blogs to move ideas from the legal academy out to the wider public.

I picked up the “Ideas” section of the Sunday Boston Globe (always a distressingly thin section for such a grandiose name). There on the front page was an article about the recent enactment of a restrictive abortion law in South Dakota that directly challenges the fundamental premise of the Roe v. Wade decision.

I thought to myself: this sounds like a blog post I read a few weeks ago by my friend Jessica Silbey (a law professor at Suffolk University here in Boston and a contributor to the nifty group blog LawCulture). I began to read. Lo and behold, the article was based on her blog post.

There is all kinds of debate about the role of blogging in the legal academy. There will be plenty more such debate this coming Friday at the Berkman Center’s conference on the subject. But that’s a pretty good pro-blogging case study.

Filed under: Blogging, Law School