21 Apr Solum on Blogging and Legal Scholarship
Solum argues that blogs can function in two ways that contribute to the emergence of the new order of short-form, open access, disintermediated legal scholarship. First, blogs themselves can serve as the medium by which short form scholarship is written and disseminated and second, blogs can serve to introduce and disseminate legal scholarship.
Solum concludes that “[l]egal scholarship is changing. Disintermediated short-form open-access legal scholarship is already here to stay. I don’t pretend to know the future of legal scholarship, but I do know this. The future is not the one-hundred page law review article. The future is not the closed-access peer-edited journal. Perhaps the most important thing about blogs is this: they enable experimentation. Experiment enables transformation. Legal scholarship is being transformed.”
But there is one key aspect of the relationship between blogging and legal scholarship that I think Solum is missing. He describes blogging as a world of disintermediation, a world that removes intermediaries such as law review editors and advisory boards at academic presses. Solum suggests that the interaction of blogging, SSRN, and Google contribute to a new world that eschews the middle man. But I question this conclusion. That may feel right today, in a day when the barriers to entry for legal blogging are low and the legal blogosphere is still relatively pristine and untrammeled. But I strongly suspect that ten years from now the barriers to entry for successful blogging will be quite high. In a decade or so, a successful legal blog will be simply another intermediary.
To illustrate, in a decade hence, a new criminal law professor will not start a new criminal law blog because Doug Berman and other criminal law professors will have claimed the territory. A young constitutional scholar will not start a new blog about the Supreme Court because SCOTUSblog and others will have filled that niche. In a decade, the blogging goal for young scholars will be to secure a gig as a guest blogger, or a favorable mention in a blog post about her latest article. Of course, for established scholars the barriers to entry will be lower and their choices might also include a decision to establish a new blog or join an already successful one.
In the future, law blogs will function as intermediaries through their role as news aggregators. Few scholars have the time or inclination to regularly scan recent SSRN uploads for the latest developments in their field. Specialty law blogs serve as news aggregators about developments in the discipline. When legal blogs function as news aggregators, they filter what is newsworthy and what is not, including new legal scholarship. A blog post about a recently published article by a young scholar will quadruple their downloads on SSRN in one day. (Indeed, this already happens).
I suspect that ten years from now law review articles will be just as popular and selection in a top journal will continue to have the same cueing function that it does today. But the favorable mention of an article in a major law blog will serve as another cueing function that the article is worthy of attention.
So Solum may be correct that we are entering a new world of open-access and short form scholarship. But I suspect he is wrong that we are entering a new world of disintermediation. The brave new world is not one of disintermediation, but new intermediation. And the face of Larry Solum is the face of a new and important intermediary.
Thanks Roger, that was indeed a very good article (I’ve come to expect no less from Solum). He now has a link to your discussion (if we could only get him to place Opinio Juris on his ‘Blogosphere’ list!). Incidentally, for some time now I’ve used Larry’s site as a winnowing function (‘a new and important intermediary’) in helping me decide which articles from SSRN I might want to download.
And perhaps one of Opinio Jurist’s contributors could help (or collaborate with, etc.) him pen some ‘international law’ oriented entries for his ‘legal theory lexicon’ (although intended for ‘first year’ law students, I’m sure its readership extends well beyond that category), as it’s the one glaring lacuna in his otherwise excellent glossary guide.
Though I am flattered, Roger, by the idea that my blogging could somehow help “occupy the field” and crowd out new-comers, the legal world is much too big and complicated and in need of explication to create the intermediaries problems you suggest.
The more I blog on sentencing topics, the more I wish there were others in my field blogging on sentencing topics. And I am always excited/eager to see new profs enter the market AND I will be inclined to give then a lot of attention/links if they are writing different and interesting stuff. Indeed, a new entrant into the blogosphere always excites me more than seeing someone familiar doing no more than just promoting points made in prior scholarship.
Brandy Karl at her Blawg Review #54 compares law blogging to Alice in Wonderland and, linking to this discussion, asks whether the Mad Tea-Party is full. Quite entertaining.
Roger Alford