How Blogs Are Transforming Legal Scholarship

These are the opening remarks I (Paul L. Caron) delivered at the Symposium on Bloggership: How Blogs Are Transforming Legal Scholarship at Harvard Law School on April 28, 2006.

Part One describes how my work on TaxProf Blog and the Law Professor Blog Network led me to organize this Symposium. Part Two takes inspiration from Jim Lindgren's work, Are Scholars Better Teachers?, to ask, using our twenty-three panelists as guinea pigs, Are Scholars Better Bloggers?

The data indicate that our participants include some of the most heavily-cited and heavily-downloaded legal scholars who edit many of the most heavily-trafficked law blogs. Although the data do not do not conclusively answer the question raised, they demonstrate that we have assembled an impressive array of scholar-bloggers in the first conference on the impact of blogs on legal scholarship.

The papers and commentary are organized around four themes:

(1) Law Blogs as Legal Scholarship (papers by Doug Berman, Orin Kerr, Kate Litvak, and Larry Solum; commentary by Jim Lindgren and Ellen Podgor);

(2) The Role of the Law Professor Blogger (papers by Gail Heriot, Gordon Smith, and Eugene Volokh; commentary by Randy Barnett and Michael Froomkin);

(3) Blogs, First Amendment Law, and Co-Blogging Law (papers by Glenn Reynolds and Eric Goldman; commentary by Dan Solove and Betsy Malloy); and

(4) The Many Faces of Law Professor Blogs (papers by Ann Althouse, Christine Hurt & Tung Yin, and Larry Ribstein; commentary by Howard Bashman and Paul Butler).

Paul Butler perhaps best captured the spirit of the Symposium with this clarion call: Blogs are walking up to legal scholarship and slapping it in the face. Blogs say to legal scholarship: 'How dare you! Evolve or Die!' . . . I feel like I am part of a movement that could change the world.

FULL TEXT

Caron, Paul L., Are Scholars Better Bloggers? - Bloggership: How Blogs are Transforming Legal Scholarship. Washington University Law Quarterly, Vol. 84, p. 1025, 2006 Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=947637