Blogs and Legal Scholarship -- The Perspective of a Blog Reader

Responding now to Al’s comment to my first post.  Al writes that it “[s]eems like a few years back when Hurt and Yin wrote that article that there were a series of pieces of how blogs were changing scholarship. Two points here. First, now when people talk about how blogs are changing scholarship they did it ... on blogs (or in an electronic companion of a journal). Second, I'm wondering if it's time for some more in-depth re-assessment of what blogs are doing (if anything) to legal scholarship. I'd be interested in your thoughts on this.”  I’m not sure if anyone else is interested in my thoughts on this question, but I’m going to share them anyway, after the jump.  Be warned, though: what follows is a highly idiosyncratic, first-person take on the question, which may bore the unprepared.

 

First, two caveats.  I know this topic – like virtually every other topic – has been amply debated in years past.  I have only been an active blog reader for about five years: anything written before I became aware of law blogs generally – and, if I’m honest, the vast majority of everything written after that time – is a mystery to me, and thus my comments here are likely duplicative of those already made by others with much more experience as both bloggers and legal scholars generally.  And second, I am a blog reader, really, not a blog writer.  While the points I make below apply in part to writing and reading alike, what follows necessarily reflects my bias as a reader.  I’ll leave thoughts about the similarities and differences between the writing of blog posts and scholarship to those actively engaged in both. 

My own view, subject to those caveats, is that blogging and legal scholarship serve quite distinct purposes, and that efforts to make the two converge don’t strike me as very promising.

As a reader of both scholarship and blogs, I read for information.  Obviously.  So too with reading the cereal box.  And the blogs I follow – law, finance/economics, history, current events, and various intersections between and among those topics – do overlap substantively with the scholarly books and articles that I read.  But the overlap ends (almost, as you’ll see) at that level of generality.  I read scholarship as part of a vocation.  When I sit down with a well-written and well-researched book or article, I take time to read notes and situate what I am learning in the broader context the author has provided for me.  The reading is slower and more didactic.  By the end, I expect to know the primary research, context, and authors’ conclusions well enough to know whether and how the work will help me in my own projects.  As a beginner, I also expect that I will have learned, osmotically, a bit about the scholar’s craft.  But in all cases, reading scholarship is work, albeit an extremely pleasant form. 

Blog reading, with one exception, is not work.  I read blogs for at least four reasons, some of which overlap.  First, blogs provide a basic search function, locating primary sources of both academic and non-academic interest.  Taking a quick look at my RSS feed, I’d say that about 60% of the blogs I read serve this purpose. Blogs are an excellent mechanism to extend one’s natural reach into the world’s stream of constantly updated information.  This is true in both the “real” and academic worlds.  In the real world, while I read newspapers and other web-based news sources like Pro Publica or Politico, bloggers of all stripes stay attuned to a wider array of matters than I can access in any given day.  Here, I read almost nothing in the blogosphere that requires original reporting (Felix Salmon’s blog at Reuters is a partial exception): it is all synthetic.  In the academic world, bloggers I follow not infrequently highlight recent scholarship.  I would guess that about a third of the newly published books that I read and maybe a quarter of law review articles come to my attention through blog posts, with Concurring Opinions’s excellent practice of posting recent LRs’ hyperlinked tables of contents providing significant grist for this mill.  To be sure, as inferred by the just-cited estimates, I find most of my original sources on my own, or through the bibliographies of other scholars’ work.  And frankly, I wish academic bloggers would highlight their own and others’ work more often: I’m quite lazy, and hearing about the work that people whose opinions I have come to respect via blogging are reading and writing is always tremendously valuable.  It also saves time as I try to keep abreast of scholarly developments in my field, particularly during these years of clerking and non-law academia when I don’t get the benefit of full-time participation in the academic life of a law school.  Which is all to say, blogs provide a valuable search service in locating the real documents that I, as a budding scholar, need to read.

Second, I read blogs because of some aspect of the individual blogger’s identity, ideology, or writing style makes her contribution to present conversations valuable in some way.  This kind of reading has almost nothing to do with legal scholarship, and probably constitutes about 20% of my blog-reading.  The contribution may come because the blogger has a particularly elegant or entertaining writing style, or is particularly wise or insightful.  It also includes those bloggers who have an ideological certainty about the world that I don’t share, but that I still find useful to understand beyond the caricature of those perspectives that I can create on my own.

Third, I read blogs to procrastinate, much as I read through Facebook status updates or scan the front page of the New York Times for the tenth time in a day.  My brain is tired, I lack the motivation to really commit to the next item on the agenda, and so I visit Google Reader to see if anything new can facilitate, e.g., my putting off brushing my teeth. I’d say procrastinatory blog reading constitutes another 10% of my blog time, but 95% of the blogs that I read.

Only the fourth kind of blog reading compares to the work I associate with reading scholarship.  Rarely, one of the other blogs I regularly read will post a something significant – well researched, full of hyperlinks to the sources supporting assertions, and making arguments or presenting evidence that I find original and scholarly.  When I find such a post, I almost always “star” it and come back to it when I am not procrastinating or am otherwise ready to do the work needed to understand and assimilate the ideas that the blogger presents.

In answer, then, to Al’s original question, I think reading blogs has very, very little to do with the work of scholarship, other than as a very useful search and broadcast function.  That’s not to say, of course, that blogging serves a lesser purpose.  Just a different one. 

There’s more to say about this activity that takes up a not insignificant amount of my week, but I’ll end it there.  I’m curious, though:  Why do Faculty Lounge readers read blogs?  For reasons other than those mentioned?  And if so, for reasons that feel more like the work of reading scholarship?  

Comments

[Colin Miller]

1. I read blogs mainly for two things: (1) to learn about new things about which I was previously unaware; and (2) to get the blogger's take on certain topics. Some of this reading is for business (e.g., the Civil Procedure & Federal Courts Blog), some of it is for pleasure (e.g., a movie or sports blog), and some of it is for both (e.g., this blog). These are mainly the same reasons that I started my blog: so that evidence professors, lawyers, judges, students, and some lay people could learn about recent developments in evidence law and/or get my take on them.

2. My reading of legally focused blogs is partially about teaching and partially about scholarship. I read blogs both to learn about new developments that I feel I could/should incorporate into my classes and to spark ideas about things I might want to research/write about in the future.

3. In terms of the relationship between blogs and scholarship, I imagine that many people read legal blogs in part to get some ideas for future scholarship. I know that I've gotten a few e-mails from people who have written articles that they say were prompted by reading something on my blog. This also provides part of the reason why I write a blog: pre-scholarship. Most of my articles now originate from ideas I initially explored on my blog, such as a piece I just finished a few days ago, which originated as a blog post about a recent case.

4. I think that the biggest impact that blogs have had on legal scholarship, though, is the rise of the online law review supplement. I think that blogs revealed that, for many pieces, the typical long-form law review article that takes 6-12 months from acceptance to publication doesn't make much sense. This has now prompted a huge number of law reviews to create online supplements in which professors can publish looser, shorter pieces that address current developments with a much quicker turnaround. More and more, we are seeing a three-tier approach to recent developments in the law: (1) a professor publishes a quick-hitter in the hours/days after a new law, case, etc. on a blog with some initial impressions; (2) a professor publishes a 1,000-5,000-ish word essay in an online supplement that backs up these initial impressions with some preliminary research; and (3) a professor publishes a long-form piece in a traditional law review that is comprehensively researched and footnoted. I think that, in effect, blogs revealed the utility of this second-tier.

[Bill Sherman]

When I was a law student/law review editor in the late '90s, I fielded a phone call from a professor who decried the law review format. He said that profs have lots of great ideas and observations that should be shared, but that the profs didn't have the time (or inclination) to develop 75% of them into ultra-footnoted 80-pagers, so the ideas go nowhere. He pitched the fanciful idea of a slimmed-down "Journal of Good Ideas." Sounds great, I sez, but I don't see how it would work. this, of course, was probably within months of the popularization of blogs...

The best legal academic blog posts, I think, fill the need for a venue to discuss or raise good ideas that would otherwise die as echoes in the halls of faculty offices or conferences. I'm grateful for those posts, and wish I'd thought harder about how to develop that prof's idea way back when.

[Dave]

There are differences within and among law blogs. But they are in fact popular. If you notice, they are slipping into the citations of more "print" law journal (both law review and specialty journals) indicative that they do present some "value" to academic scholarship. Is there a substantial amount of "waste" among blogs, yes. On the other hand, there are (as referenced above) some good blog posts which do contribute to scholarship.

[Jim Loxley]

Interesting write-up. In my experience as a legal marketer in the UK, blogs have had a dramatic effect in the industries, scholarships and otherwise. Because of the nature of law, with it's many shades of grey and hot debatable topics, and the nature of legal professionals as a demographic, they just seem to do really well. Legal pros love a good quality blawg, and they take notice.

[y8car]

Thank you for the wise critique. Me & my neighbour were preparing to do some research about that. We got a excellent book on that matter from our local library and most books exactly where not as influensive as your details. I’m pretty glad to see these details which I was searching for a long time.