Is the Future of Legal Scholarship in the Blogosphere?

By Kristopher A. Nelson
in September 2007

300 words / 2 min.
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Is the Future of Legal Scholarship in the Blogosphere? by Margaret A. Schilt in Legal Times: If you are looking for the future of legal scholarship, chances are that you may find it not in a treatise or the traditional law review but in a different form, profoundly influenced by the blogosphere. Law-related blogs are […]


Please note that this post is from 2007. Evaluate with care and in light of later events.

Is the Future of Legal Scholarship in the Blogosphere? by Margaret A. Schilt in Legal Times:

If you are looking for the future of legal scholarship, chances are that you may find it not in a treatise or the traditional law review but in a different form, profoundly influenced by the blogosphere.

Law-related blogs are proliferating on the Internet—more than 80 are listed on the blogroll of one popular law-related blog, Concurring Opinions. A significant number of the blogs—sometimes called “blawgs”—are hosted by law professors.

What do these blogs look like? There’s a wide variety, from the weighty to the conversational or, in the jargon, the more “bloggy.” On the Becker-Posner Blog, Judge Richard Posner and economist Gary Becker debate issues such as crime and economic development, health care reform and whether higher education is a good investment.

Ann Althouse, professor of law at the University of Wisconsin Law School, blogs (althouse.blogspot.com) in a more personal, less self-consciously scholarly mode, addressing subjects from Rudy Giuliani’s campaign to the auto show to Mother’s Day. (See “I Am in Love With Blogging.”) Somewhere in the middle are blogs such as The Volokh Conspiracy, where Eugene Volokh fosters dialogue among 17 scholars on law and public issues, and the Law Professor Blogs, a collection of 50 different subject-related blogs, such as the ImmigrationProf Blog.