Over at PrawfsBlawg, Paul Horwitz has posted a thoughtful response to my essay Blogs and the Legal Academy.
Paul’s post puts me in a terrible bind: If I’m arguing in my essay that blogs aren’t well-situated to advance legal scholarship, and Paul’s blog post suggests I may be wrong, I can’t very well post a substantive response on this blog without conceding defeat! Seriously, though, I think his post brings out a point that I touch on briefly but should expand in my draft, that blogs can provide a means to discuss and critique scholarly ideas in the same way that a workshop can. He’s also right that I need to be more careful about defining my terms. At the same time, I’m sticking to my guns that blogs aren’t well-suited to the scholarly enterprise. Paul is right that it is possible to use a blog to develop scholarly ideas. But I don’t claim it is impossible; rather, I claim that the blog format makes it difficult. And I think that’s right, for the reasons I discuss in the essay.
Written like a gentleman and scholar, sir. I have no strong objections to your last point; it just seems to me that there’s nothing *terribly* strong about the functionality of blogs that means one couldn’t do scholarship there. It’s true it is especially well-suited to diaristic, brief posts; but it is not impossible to engage in long-form writing there, and of course one picks up the benefit of hyperlinks. I think perhaps more has to do with the fact that the prestige, and the audience, follows publication in the traditional fora for legal scholarship.
Orin, not to brag on my own work excessively, but Greg Robinson’s and my realtime debunking (see here: http://www.isthatlegal.org/Muller_and_Robinson_on_Malkin.html) of Michelle Malkin’s “In Defense of Internment” while she was on her media blitz about the book was far more effective than a months-later publication in a scholarly (or, for that matter, popular press) journal could ever have been. (To wit, Reason Magazine asked me for a review of the book almost immediately after I started blogging about the book during a guest-blogging stint at the Volokh Conspiracy and on my own blog, but it was not until 4 months later that Reason got the book review out, by which point interest in Malkin’s book had already significantly declined.)
So perhaps the claim in your essay is not wrong, but just too broad: surely there are *some* modes of scholarship that benefit from the immediacy and accessibility of blogs.
The blog format, especially with comments, may advance legal scholarship far more than you realize. Much legal scholarship is theoretical, dry and/or esoteric. Much of the “theory” scholarship I read lacks real world perspective and the sense of “hey, that’s STUPID” — if it is defensible within some accepted “school” of legal scholarship, it passes for reasonable scholarship. In this sense, legal scholarship is much like much current corporate legal advice — one tells the client an action is O.K. if the action is arguably legal, when one should tell the client that engaging in such an action is just a blame fool thing to do.
The informal format of blogs thus can give authors a place to float what may be idiotic ideas and see what kinds of general responses they get — especially if the blogs draw comments from a larger community. It can allow comments from a larger perspective or competing perspectives in a brief format that can force us to reexamine some of our positions (if we are fair to ourselves and not overly committed to our ideas). In a world where legal scholarship often, to me at least, seems to aspire to become a branch of political science, economics, literature, black or feminist studies or sociology (looking at law from power or philosophical perspectives, rhetorical perspectives, literary perspectives or “movement” perspectives, for example), learning to address law in the format of the blog — which generally requires remembering to address the rules of behavior one seeks to establish and that government will enforce these rules — can enhance legal scholarship and its role in determinations of policy.
In my opinion, of course.
I leave only a link:
http://metacomments.blogspot.com/2006/04/blogs-suck-and-i-hate-them.html