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Print This PageDo Student Law Review Editors Read Opinio Juris?
A remark in passing by KJH (“law review editors, I mean you”) caused me to recall a question I’ve had for a while. Do student law review, or international law review, editors read or know about OJ? I have asked this question of my own school’s international law review editors over the last couple of years, and the answer was no. It seemed as though something about the law journal experience tended to turn student editors inwards upon the review and all the work it entails – screening submissions, etc., etc. – rather than looking outwards to places that might provide clues about what kinds of topics are current. My assumption is that student editors who might read OJ are not registered to be able to comment, so I won’t ask for editors to tell me via comments, but if you wanted to send an email to a personal email account, blaisecendrars2004 at yahoo dot you know the rest, I’d be curious about if you read, what you read, and why. For that matter, if you’re a student at all and want to tell me what or why you read, I’d be interested too.
Update: I’d like to congratulate Boalt on its … sagacity and exceptionally high standards in blog reading; and thank Non Liquet for very generous response with many good thoughts – take a look at it. Apparently you don’t need to register to comment, so you don’t need to send to my email address if you are moved to want to say something. But read Non Liquet’s thoughts.
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Just to correct Ken, for the student editors out there, you do not need to be registered to post a comment on Opinio Juris so you can feel free to post comments (one of the benefits of this site over other legal blogs is its lack of registration!).
I am not your targeted demographic being a few years out of law school and into practice, but I started to read legal blogs, including the first version of Opinio Juris, during law school so maybe I can offer a few comments that may be helpful, albeit reflective of only my personal experience.
Blogs, in general, are still a limited medium and sometimes more involved bloggers forget that the majority of people, including informed lawyers and law students, still do not read them on a regular basis. Add to that, that academic law blogs are even more specialized than your average blog and that further narrows their visibility to the general public and thus their readership.
So, I came to legal blogs not because I was looking into web sites that wrote about the law and wanted to stay current, but because I was a blog reader already and was intellectually curious about the law. I then tended to gravitate to blogs which wrote about topics that interested me (for my part, international law and issues of executive power). There were a few of us though who did read legal blogs and that could steer those that didn’t on the journals and in moot court to individuals we liked.
I think the better questions for you to ask your student editors is whether (a) they read blogs on a regular basis; (b) if they do so, whether they read legal blogs; and then (c) out of the legal blogs they read do they read Opinio Juris. If the answer to “a” is no, then I really doubt you’ll find that they read OJ. It’s also the people who answer “yes” to (a) that you really want to attract and who will steer people to your writing and your articles.
(The one downside is that several of us had a running mental list of legal bloggers we thought were insane!)
I would also say that legal blogs are not always the best way to stay “current” on many topics in the law. For some topics, that is true and for others it is not. Many legal blog posts are either too academic or too idiosyncratic to be practically useful (and I don’t mean that as exclusively a negative). In other ways, legal academics can be rather behind practitioners, sometimes markedly so. Trade journals and list serves tend to be far better sources for a lot of fields and some update fairly regularly (daily or weekly). In many cases, I would suggest editors start there rather than blogs if they were searching for external sources on a variety of topics including in international law on what’s current.
Finally, as an aside Ken, since I know you enjoy law and economics — you should ask how many of your students have heard of Above the Law rather than Opinio Juris. Maybe if you want to increase OJ’s visibility to law students you should start publishing about law firm salaries and layoffs!
at 5:08 pm EST Non Liquet
We do at Boalt
at 6:31 pm EST AE
Won’t you necessarily get a biased sample? But I got this through a friend, and will send it on to editors I know (I’m a conscientious objector from editing, so I shall abstain).
at 8:06 pm EST Molly
I’m assuming only those who know us and love us will respond … that will be enough
at 8:20 pm EST Kenneth Anderson
I am a student, and a regular reader of OJ. Unfortunately I must admit I am not a Law Review Editor. As my time has been focused on the International Human Rights Law Clinic, and other Internationally related activities.
I should say however that sometimes an OJ article becomes great fodder for conversation at meetings of the OU International Law Society.
at 9:15 pm EST Michael J. Davis
I am studying for a law degree at NUJS, India and I am one of the student editors of IYIL. I follow OJ quite religiously. So are the other student editors of the Indian Yearbook of Int’l Law (tentatively titled; subject to registration) which is due to publish its first volume in 2010. And we have recommended the blog to the ed. assts as well.
at 9:06 am EST Kiran
I’m a new staff member on the Loyola of Los Angeles International & Comparative Law Review, and I’ve had several editors suggest that we read OJ.
at 11:21 am EST LLS
I just joined NYU’s Journal of International Law & Politics, so I can’t speak for anyone else, but I’ve been reading OJ for the last year or so.
I imagine that, as work picks up, I’ll need to cut down on blog reading, but I’m not sure yet whether it’ll be some of the general political blogs that I’ve been following for years or the more subject-specific blogs like OJ that’ll end up on the cutting floor.
at 3:01 pm EST NYU Law
I was an Articles Editor at a T10 international law journal last year and read OJ on an almost daily basis. I found that it helped me get a sense of the important scholars in the field and some of the “hot” topics. It also helped me gather general international law knowledge which was helpful for Jessup Moot Court.
at 8:30 pm EST 2009 Graduate
SJU has an International Law Journal & Borgen is one of the co-founders at OJ. So, I hope someone at the SJU International Law Journal reads OJ.
at 12:07 am EST Dave
Response… I’m an editor on a general interest journal. Never read OJ before today, but my reading of Volokh, Balkin, Co-op and Prawfs did come in handy in the spring, when we selected all our articles. There were a few topics and authors I knew were hot in the field because I’d read about them on blogs. However, those blogs were almost no help whatsoever with the numbing quantities of patent and tax articles I had to wade through. And they weren’t much help with the corporate articles, either, since I usually skip over posts on corporate law.
at 8:23 am EST Sean
Yep, I’m the EIC of Temple Political and Civil Rights Law Review. With that school affiliation, I think it’s probably self evident why I started reading OJ…
at 10:10 am EST Genevieve
Just to be clear … I’m not saying you can’t graduate without reading OJ … but especially if you’re at Temple or SJU or WCL or a few others, well, you catch my drift …
at 11:43 am EST Kenneth Anderson
Im not an editor but i am a provisional member of the USD ILJ and one of our editors mentioned OJ as a possible source for comment ideas.
at 2:27 pm EST Bill
Kenneth: I’m not saying reading OJ has had any impact on my grades at Temple, but, for reasons either having to do with their teaching skills or some other reason (ahem, ahem), two of my highest law school grades were from profs who write for OJ…
at 2:56 pm EST Genevieve
A message to KA email:
My name is Benjamin Jones, and I am co-Editor in Chief of the Berkeley Journal of International Law (BJIL). I do read Opinio Juris frequently, asdid my predecessors on the Journal. I find Opinio Juris an interestingexperiment in blog-based legal commentary, although I’ve never based asubmissions decision upon the visibility of an issue on the blog.In my mind, the long-term question is one of convergence; as law reviewsface similar cost constraints in an era of declining paper subscriptions,will the right approach be to develop independent online identities withthe possibility of linkage between websites (as blogs function today), orwill some greater convergence be necessary to bring the dozens if nothundreds of international law reviews under a common roof?Of course, I don’t have the answers, but as a market leader ininternational law blogging, I suspect that Opinio Juris will have someimpact on the choices that law reviews ultimately make. Student-managedlaw reviews and academic-managed law blogs may well be ships passing inthe night, but there may be mutual benefits to closer coordination betweenthese organizations as the traditional means of disseminating scholarlywriting fall victim to countervailing pressures to control costs andaccelerate production
at 3:28 pm EST Kenneth Anderson
Another email – apologies in all these for the bad formatting.
I am not a student law review editor (nor a student anymore), but I do read OJ quite often and I imagined you might be interested to know about it.
I am a Brazilian lawyer / international law scholar (or at least I plan to be one). I have just finished my LLM at the University of Chicago(where I took several int’l law-related courses) and also a LLM in International Law in Brazil. Now, I am going to work for one year as a foreign associate in a major NY firm.
I read OJ in order to stay aware of the int’l law discussions / hot topics in the American academic environment. Int’l law scholars must keep an eye on what happens elsewhere and OJ is an excellent tool for this.
at 3:30 pm EST Kenneth Anderson
I am an “Articles Editor” (third rung down in our editorial hierarchy) at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law Review, a generalist student law journal. I read OJ as part of my general blog subscriptions, which has expanded to include lots of law blogs since I started law school.
at 5:21 pm EST Padraic
I am a co-EIC of the Journal of International Law at the University of Minnesota and I read OJ regularly. We also mentioned OJ, along with many other law blogs, to our staff this year as a place to look for potential note topics.
at 6:44 pm EST George
From what I can tell, a fairly broad range of students at NYU Law do indeed read Opinio Juris and other IL-themed law blogs (although with regrettably less regularity than they do Above the Law).
Speaking just for myself, I’ve found OJ and SCOTUSblog, taken together, to be invaluable resources in tracking the litigation and scholarship around detention, rendition, and the international human rights impacts of the U.S. “war on terror” over the past few years.
Keep up the great work!
at 10:25 am EST NYU