Census of Law Professor Twitter Users — Beta Version

Bridget — I think two of the people in the faculty lounge here tweet: Dan and Kim. Though perhaps they tweet only their posts and maybe you're looking for people who tweet something other than the introductions to their blog posts?

Bridget — I tweet about law and higher education issues as @btSMU.

Ryan Calo @rcalo University of Washington

Thanks!

Hi —

A few of the ELS Blog (http://www.elsblog.org/) gang tweet:

William Henderson (IU) at @wihender
Ted Eisenberg (Cornell) @TheEisenberg
(me at @prisonrodeo)

Also:

Jim Chen (Louisville) also tweets at chenx064
Rick Hasen (Loyola – LA) @rickhasen
Sam Bagenstos (UMich) @sbagen

Also, Lisa McElroy.

Nice list. Missed me at @phlu (Ross Silverman, Southern Illinois University). – Ross Also: Thaddeus Pope @thaddeuspope, Lance Gable at @professorgable

Bridget — that's a lot of tweeting going on, it seems. As someone who doesn't tweet — though I guess I am awakened every once in a while by tweeting going on outside my window — I'm wondering when we'll have some discussion around the faculty lounge about why law faculty tweet. What's the attraction? What niche does this fill?

And — Kim will appreciate this in particular, perhaps — will you or she put up a post soon, "Why doesn't everyone tweet?"

I tweet at @workplaceadresq – Appalachian School of Law

Thanks to Chris Zorn for mentioning that I tweet about election law at @Rickhasen, but I am now at UC Irvine. (Also tweeting about my upcoming book at @TheVotingWars

I tweet at @whitecollarprof
Stetson University College of Law

Great list, and very useful, thanks! Some corrections and additions (not surprisingly, skewed heavily towards my own research interests):

Yochai Benkler now tweets @YBenkler; last tweet @YochaiBenkler was from 2008.

Additional law profs (NB: these vary widely in levels of (in)activity):

@jonathanmasur (Chicago)
@russellkorobkin (UCLA)
@greggbloche (GULC)
@LawandBioDigest (Nita Farahany, Vandy)
@aliciaouellette (Albany)
@qmulbioethics (Richard Ashcroft, School of Law at Queen Mary, U. of London)
@CaulfieldTim (U. Alberta Law)
@RuthStirton (U. Sheffield Law)

Law-trained faculty at non-law schools:

@StephenLatham (Director of Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics, Yale)
@jedperry (Josh Perry, prof. of Business Law and Ethics at Indiana B-School)

If law school fellows/VAPs count:

@rford (Roger Ford, Bigelow Fellow, Chicago)
@lawbioethics (Matt Lamkin, Fellow, SLS Center for Law & the Biosciences)
ahem, @MichelleNMeyer (Academic Fellow, HLS Petrie-Flom Center)

On that note, you might also consider adding the Twitter accounts of law school centers. General institutional accounts are probably not very exciting (no offense, e.g., @Harvard_Law), but the work of some profs is disseminated via the centers with which they're associated rather than through their own individual accounts, e.g.:

‏@yaleisp (Information Society Project at YLS)
@StanfordCLB (SLS Center for Law & the Biosciences)
@berkmancenter (now HU-wide, but retains HLS links)
@PetrieFlom (Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology & Bioethics at HLS)
@HeLEXOxford (Centre for Health, Law and Emerging Technologies)
@PHLR_Temple (RWJ-funded center for public health law research at Temple Law)
@volokhcom (tweets alerts to new blog posts at Volokh Conspiracy)

@Al: YMMV, but for me, having a Twitter account serves two (sets of) purposes. First, my research interests are (a) highly interdisciplinary, and (b) involve fields where research is fast-moving (e.g., genetics). I use Twitter to connect with (primarily) non-law people in relevant fields (mostly scientists and science writers) with whom I might not otherwise interact, given academic silos, and who tend to first report their work or thoughts via Twitter (certainly faster than published work, and not everyone has a blog, even though it sometimes feels that way). Sometimes the Twitter musings of and conversations with these folks are useful. Other times, what I find useful is their links to various sources; it's a big Internet, and carefully curating one's Twitter feed can serve as a helpful link aggregator. In that respect, establishing a Twitter account in order to follow others isn't much different than regularly reading certain blogs or subscribing to their feeds.

That was my primary reason for establishing a Twitter account. But, second, once you do establish an account and begin following people, you'll find that people begin to follow you. (This may seem obvious, and probably should have been to me, but at the time I found it odd.) Some tweeps (I am not among them) feel an obligation to follow anyone who follows them, so you'll get followers that way, even if you never tweet yourself. But Twitter isn't like Facebook; relationships can be and often are unilateral rather than bilateral. So you'll also get followers whom you don't follow but who apparently think you have something interesting to say, whether because of your occasional tweet (or high-quality, carefully selected retweets), because of your institutional affiliation, or whatever. As someone without a blog, I now occasionally use Twitter as a "microblogging" platform myself. Microblogging has its advantages — among them, my output can be low volume without alienating my followers (indeed, high-volume Tweeps tend to be more alienating unless their high-volume output is also very high-quality), whereas I'd feel pressure to regularly blog, and with (much) longer posts, in order to attract and retain followers. (Though I confess I sometimes spend an embarrassing amount of time trying to artfully squeeze a thought into 140 characters.) FWIW.

Thanks for that explanation, Michelle–really interesting. I'm going to mull this some.

Bridget, Thanks for compiling this list, and for comparing the gender ratio–so interesting. Another tweeting law professor to add is my MSU Law colleague Daniel Martin Katz @computational

I tweet (rarely) @VolunteerTwit. Thnaks for maintaining a list.

Thanks, everyone, for all of the additions and corrections to the list! Keep 'em coming. At this point, I'm not listing VAPs, fellows, group blogs or centers, but as Michelle Meyer points out above, there is much news of good work coming from those sources, too.

I tweet @juvjusticeblog. UNC Law.

A few other Santa Clara tweeters:

@StephenFDiamond
@BrianJLove

I compiled a list of Internet law/IP professor Twitter accounts at https://twitter.com/#!/ericgoldman/internet-ip-profs/members

Tweeting while the Law School model burns. Sigh.

Is this post for real? I know it's summer and all, but c'mon! This is pathetic.

May I recomend some summer reading for you all?:

http://insidethelawschoolscam.blogspot.com/

Bob and Terry Malloy,

We talk about all manner of things here at the faculty lounge, including employment prospects for students. My colleague Bernie Burk put up an important post about this recently, which I think you both would find of much interest:

http://www.thefacultylounge.org/2012/07/abas-class-of-2011-employment-outcomes-data-show-how-rough-it-is-out-there.html

It's heartwarming to see that so many law professors have so much time on their hands. What a thoroughly agreeable lifestyle they all must have.

Great listing, Bridget, thanks!

Here are some suggestions of names to add:

* Eugene Volokh, VolokhC
* Julie Cohen, julie17usc
* YochaiBenkler, YochaiBenkler
* Lawrence Solum, lsolum
* Michael Geist, mgeist
* Michael Scott, also at LawProf, InternetLaw, CopyrightLaw, and transform_media
* David S. Levine, hearsayculture

Here are possible errors in the above listing:

* Miriam Cherry is Prof_MCherry
* Tim Caulfield is CaulfieldTim
* Blake Hudson is ForestLawProf
* Tracey McGaugh is millennialprof
* Not sure about correct page for Alicia Ouellette

Ira

P.S. – if it's ok, I put together a listing of your names (with my suggestions) for people to use on Twitter: https://twitter.com/#!/nathenson/law-professors

What a great use of money derived from cannibalizing your students and ripping off the American taxpayer!

I am @civilrightsCH, tweeting for the Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse. Thanks!

Tamar's listing via @ericgoldman's feed is very helpful, too. Here are some names from that listing (there are others as well):

Lori Andrews, LoriAndrewsJD
Timothy Armstrong, tarmstro99
Barbara B. Bressler, bbressle
Jeremy de Beer, jdebeer
Ryan Calo, rcalo
Anupam Chander, AnupamChander
Chester Chuang, ChesterChuang
Eric M. Fink, LuckyJimJD
Elizabeth Townsend Gard, ETownsendGard
Ariel Katz, relkatz
Irina Manta, irina_manta
Charlie Nesson, charlienesson
Dave Opderbeck, dopderbeck
Barbara van Schewick, vanschewick
Peter Swire ‏ @peterpswire
Michael Zimmer, michaelzimmer

Sorry, somehow forget to previously mention my colleague Kyle Graham @kylefgraham

Jeff Baker @JRBProf
Faulkner University Jones School of Law

I tweet & I was a professor at Dalhousie Law School in Halifax until I took early retirement in 2009. Subjects taught at retirement were Torts, Women & Law, and Equity and Trusts. Courses taught at other times included Law & Technology, Intellectual Property, Sex Discrimination, Contracts, and Agency & Partnership.

oops … omitted twitter ID which is @jbankier

This is a great list. Thanks again for compiling it.

I thought it would be helpful for those who want an easy way to follow individuals on the list, or to subscribe to the list as a whole, if it were an actual Twitter list. So I made one through CALI's twitter account:

https://twitter.com/#!/caliorg/law-profs

Hope that's helpful!

Austin Groothuis
Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction (CALI)
http://www.cali.org

I've been using twitter to connect with former students about health law issues and this fall will experiment with tweets to stay in touch with my torts section.
@profbard (Jennifer Bard, Texas Tech).

Bob here.

Yes –

Bernie posted some data that's been available for months (I'm glad he did, otherwise it would have been ignored here). I've counted 30 plus comments to this post from professors: "ooh me, me, I tweet, and I have a book."

How many comments addressing the social justice implications of Bernie's post as it relates to the historical deceptive behavior of EACH OF YOUR SCHOOLS!?! NONE!

There are 11 comments to Bernie's post, most of which ask whether the data can be re-sorted to the commenter's preference. Conversely, there are legions of comments on the useless musings that characterize this blog.

That, professors, is why a nonesensical post like this is so infuriating: It's clear you all read this blog(as evidenced by your quick responses to this utterly useless tweet post; yet, you are nowhere to be found in the comments to Bernie's post.

Your students read. They watch. They are suffering, mightily. And you can't be bothered to discuss the most pressing issues facing legal education and its consumers? But oooh, a list? oooh, perhaps yet another useless ranking of schools, this time by professors that tweet?

What's worse, for you, is that prospective students read this blog in the context of Law School Transparency, Inside the Law School Scam, and others.

You guys are making absolute fools of yourselves, and enemies of your schools' alumni (even the successful ones, like me) with each post on this blog.

Pace Law: One of the lowest performers by nearly all measures (academic rep, practitioner rep, etc.), features these outcomes, and a $212,607 cost (easily financed by high interest, non-dischargeable, taxpayer secured debt to boot):

http://www.lawschooltransparency.com/clearinghouse/?school=pace

Thoughts professor Crawford?

Thanks for your comments, "Bob." I think you are making two points. Your first seems to be that faculty members have responded to one blog post (on this blog, asking for users of Twitter to identify themselves) and not to another. Your second point is that compiling a list of law professor Twitter users is "nonsensical."

As to why law professors have not commented more frequently or substantively on the post you mention, I do not have any data and am not sure that my speculations would be any more accurate than others' speculations. As to your comment that a Twitter census is non-sensical, I simply disagree. I find Twitter to be a helpful — but by no means perfect — way of communicating with and learning about the work of colleagues, former students and current students, practitioners in the field, and legal publishers.

I, too, Tweet, @bojack54. Jack Bogdanski, Lewis & Clark Law School.

I tweet @jagdillard. UB Law

Kevin Woodson at Drexel Law also tweets.