After posting earlier today on blogging and academia, I noticed that Larry Ribstein makes a similar point, and adds some useful observations:
[With] blawgs and SSRN . . . we see not only the published articles, but the thoughts and ideas along the way, and have a chance to gain from them. SSRN, by providing a repository for drafts, enables a kind of dialogue. I expect that these devices, or whatever they evolve into, become more important in measuring law schools and individual faculty.
I think he’s on to something. I consider myself someone who spends time reading and thinking about legal scholarship. But to date I’ve only produced a limited number of published articles. The vast majority of my reading and thinking stays below the threshold of article publication. Thus, as a legal academic, I’m a bit of a cypher. Will I produce scholarship? Schools must use their best guess.
The information gap stems from the difference between private and public forums for legal discourse. I have had countless e-mail and lunch discussions with other legal academics. I keep up with listservs. These outlets have many advantages. But by and large, there has existed a firewall between private and public discussion. Public discussion means law review articles. It is infrequent, controlled, polished, and widely available. Private discussion is found in e-mails or hallway conversations or lunch conversations. It is frequent, ad hoc, unpolished, and almost completely unavailable.
I think it’s widely accepted that private discussion correlates strongly with public discussion. I don’t write a law review piece in a vacuum; I write it after discussing the topic at length with colleagues and friends. Thus, it may be that if I can show that I’m engaging in private discussion, others will assume that I’m also going to at some point be producing results in the traditional public sphere of law reviews.
Of course, there is a such thing as too much of a good thing. If I spend all day blogging instead of working on my class prep or my law review piece, then blogging may be harming my progress as an academic.
But to the extent that the blog merely transcribes (perhaps with some additional thoughts) my everyday musings as I deal with interesting areas of law, it’s a valuable sign that I’m thinking about the right things, and perhaps that I’m likely to be producing traditional scholarship on those topics in the future.
(And of course, sometimes blogging leads directly to traditional legal scholarship).
Posted by Kaimi Wenger on May 19, 2005 at 04:03 PM