The Harvard Blogging Conference and the Future of Law Professors

Unlike any other blogger who attended the Harvard Blogging Conference on Friday, I also took the opportunity to attend another conference sponsored by the Harvard Project on Negotiation on the same day. The parallels between the two conferences were striking.

The focus of the negotiation conference was to honor the life and work of Harvard law professor Frank Sander, a seminal thinker in the development of the field of dispute resolution. Much of that conference focused on a thirty-year retrospective of how far the field of ADR has come since Sander wrote his 1976 seminal paper Varieties of Dispute Processing. Three decades ago, the concept of ADR was truly novel, but now it is commonplace. The panelists predicted that the popularity of ADR will eventually become so overwhelming that we are nearing the day when whole categories of disputes—brokerage, consumer and employment agreements—will rarely, if ever, be resolved in court. What was novel in 1976 as an alternative to litigation is now common. What is novel now as an alternative to current scholarly expectations will be common in future decades.

The Harvard blogging conference had its own set of visionaries: Glenn Reynolds, Howard Bashman, Eugene Volokh, Larry Solum, Orin Kerr, etc. But in truth, the conference was not really about blogging per se. Again and again the emphasis was on the significance of technology, and how blogging will fit within that larger revolution. Solum put it best when he said that we will see a day soon when the prevailing view about scholarship will be “if it is not on the Internet it does not exist.” That is a profound comment.

Based on the vision outlined at the Harvard blogging conference, the list below outlines the future life of law professors. Not all of these predictions came directly from the mouths of the panelists, but almost all of them flow naturally from their predictions of the broader technological revolution. And of course, not all of these predictions will come true. But it is worth thinking about how many just might.

Law Professor Expectations

• Law professors currently must balance scholarship, teaching, and institutional service. In future decades, successful law professors will balance scholarship, teaching, institutional service, and their role as public intellectuals. Being a “public intellectual” will grow in importance for law professors and law school deans.

• Law school deans will place a premium on faculty scholarship being widely read, and increasingly, traffic will be as important if not more important than placement in prestigious journals. The struggle to secure high Internet traffic (measured by paper downloads, traffic meters, etc.) will be the future bane of law professors’ existence.

Law Professor Scholarship

• Law professors currently buy into a closed system of copyright that inures to their detriment. In future decades, law professors will demand open source, non-copyrighted publication of their scholarship. Everything of any importance that a scholar writes will be on the Internet.

• Law professors currently target their scholarship to appeal to student editors at major law journals (while also targeting their peers). In future decades, law professors will target their peers directly without intermediaries.

• Law professors currently have little useful to say to practitioners, judges, or policymakers. The current divide between law professors and other stakeholders will dramatically narrow. Demand for such collaboration (measured by high traffic and significant downloads) will create incentives for law professors to work toward closer collaboration with these other stakeholders.

• Short form scholarship will become reputable and the divide between law journals and blogs will narrow.

• Online publication of articles on SSRN or similar databases will become fully searchable and will allow for comments. This will provide opportunities for feedback for scholarship that is immediate, permanent, and quantifiable.

• Online publication on SSRN and similar databases will move scholarship toward a global audience. That audience will actively engage American law school scholarship. The closed loop of scholarship targeting an exclusive audience of professors at top American law schools will diminish in importance.

• As scholarly communities develop throughout the world, future decades will see most legal scholarship migrating toward the use of a uniform language, i.e., English.

Law School Publications

• Westlaw and Lexis as we know them will not survive. In future decades, everything of any importance relating to the law will be available on the Internet. All legislation, court decisions, treaties, and scholarship will be online, full searchable, and organized around major Internet portals. Citation to material on the Internet will be normal.

• Wiki technology will be the next big thing in law school technology. Increasingly black letter law will be available on the Internet. As a result of this technology, many current products will not survive. Commercial outlines of law school classes and bar preparation material will migrate to the Internet, likely through wiki technology. The demand for law professors to write commercial outlines will disappear.

• Christensen and Darby printers as we know them will not survive. As SSRN and similar online databases become ubiquitous, journals will migrate their future publications to the Internet. Demand for print versions of many journals will diminish greatly, jeopardizing the financial future of those printers.

Law Professors and Students

• As a result of technology, in future years the relationship between law professors and students will be less vertical. Really bad or good teaching will be transparent and openly discussed on student blogs or professor rating services. Professors will develop broader public reputations as good or bad teachers. Scandalous or controversial behavior by professors will increasingly be in the public domain.

• Professors will be under pressure to podcast their lectures. If they do, class attendance will decline significantly. When class attendance plummets, law professors will be under counter pressure to stop podcasting and re-focus on live, interactive lectures.
  

Law School Conferences

• Professors will increasingly participate in conferences that are exclusively online. Fewer conferences will require travel for participation as a panelist or audience member. All major conferences will be available on the Internet in some form, either through webcasting, audio streaming, or blog summaries. Online conference participation also will allow for remote participation through questions from the online audience.

• Currently Ann Althouse blogs while she is on the dais just prior to speaking. In the future, she will blog while she is actually speaking at a conference. She will coin a new term for this practice.

Related posts:
Quotable Quotes at the Harvard Blogging Conference