Info/Law

Bill and I are here in Ames Courtroom listening to Bloggership: How Blogs Are Transforming Legal Scholarship. Paul Caron is talking about the Law Professor Blogs Network, noting that Jim Lindgren and Allison Nagelberg found that highly-cited scholars are viewed as better teachers by law students. He tackles the question of whether scholars are better bloggers, looking at stats such as symposia participation and citations. Paul says there are about 235 American law prof blogs out of 36 million total blogs (citing Daniel Solove). He points out that, for the profs participating in this conference, their number of citations in law review articles, SSRN downloads, and unique blog visitors are strongly correlated, and argues that better scholars are better bloggers.

Doug Berman, who blogs on sentencing law and policy, says that this medium is simply another form of communication, and that the issue is how law professors should spend their time to maximize their perception as legal scholars. (He notes the power of tenure and promotion committees in this zone.) The Harvard Law Review, he states, has evolved towards articles that are longer, contain a greater number of footnotes, and are written by academics rather than practicing attorneys – epitomizing the trend of “standard” legal scholarship. This shift is also driven by technology: it’s far easier to produce long, heavily footnoted articles with computers and advanced offset printing. He argues blogging can help integrate teaching, scholarship, and service to the profession. It makes all of us (not just profs) peers and enhances conversation and learning.

Larry Solum posits that blogging in legal academe differs from blogging in other disciplines, such as philosophy, by focusing chiefly on current developments (rather than analyzing Aristotle). He puts forth 3 key ideas: the transition from long to short-form legal scholarship, from exclusive rights to open source, and disintermediation. While he loves long law review articles, sadly most are never read (including mine), most are “locked up” by copyright (including Lon Fuller’s famous piece “Consideration and Form,” 41 Colum. L. Rev. 799 (1941)), and gatekeepers such as law review boards control access / publication. He’s excited about wikis in particular, on the model of Stanford’s Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Open access to legal scholarship makes work accessible to Google, which will be vital to readers locating and reading it. Disintermediation removes barriers to publication. The key: being read, by reducing costs to readers. The implication of this new form of scholarship: globalization (via inexpensive access – Google / SSRN).

Kate Litvak doesn’t have a blog! She notes that communications technology is making some forms of knowledge (for example, of an archive) less relevant, and others more important. Working papers, such as SSRN, are becoming the norm. Interdisciplinary work, as performed by Ph.D.s and with other academic departments, is on the rise. Cost of production is going up – blame expensive data sets and statistical software. Blogging, then, is but one force transforming the legal academy. What functions do blogs serve? They entertain, answer “hot news” questions, publicize work, build communities, and disseminate scholarship. She argues blogs don’t distribute scholarship among scholars well, unlike SSRN. Blogs aren’t “water cooler conversations” because they’re public – they’re like bugged water coolers, and this distorts communication. Brainstorming differs from announcing ideas at a public forum. Unbugged coolers encourage candid interchange and limit pre-emption. Bugged coolers generate fewer incentives to participate and weaken criticism [is this true in the blogosphere?], with limited benefits – minimal interaction among commentators and less participation. (Eugene Volokh calls her the “anti-blogger”.)

Commentators begin with Paul Butler. He says that blogs “slap legal scholarship in the face” – “evolve or die.” Perhaps, he says, we don’t read long law review articles because they’re… so long. Blogging, in contrast, is cool: the medium is the message. He likes direct, non-jargon-laden, accessible writing. Blogs are to legal scholarship, he argues, as music videos are to movies. There are costs to blogging. It takes a lot of time from other work, such as class prep or other scholarship. Hit counts can influence what one blogs about. The contributors at blackprof.com always assumed the water cooler was bugged: blogging signals courage in the face of one’s critics. Getting one’s stuff out to where “the whole world is watching” is worth the risk, even when ideas are half-baked. Blogging is no longer a luxury.

Jim Lindgren agrees with Kate: other developments in legal scholarship overshadow blogging, and feedback online is less useful than that in a workshop on a paper. However, it’s possible to err by being too cautious, as well as too forthcoming. Blogging generally doesn’t count as scholarship under conventional analysis, though it varies by post. He notes the dispute over Arming America, and how blogging helped discredit the analysis.

Ellen Podgor talks on tenure and review. What if the scholarship one were reviewing were a blog? She agrees that this is a different, more accessible medium – although it’s not sufficiently accessible for the general public. Lawyers, after all, rarely read law review articles; they lack the time. Blogging isn’t always good scholarship, but many law review articles fall short here as well. (At least blogging is more environmentally sound!) She’s written a tenure review letter that, gently, notes that a prof hasn’t taken advantage of blogging. This medium can be important: Doug Berman’s blog has been cited by the Supreme Court (the ne plus ultra of scholarship). What will be the next technological advance that will affect scholarship?

Filed under: Berkman, Blogging, Scholarship