With the increasing prominence of law blogs (often termed "blawgs"), there has been much talk in academic circles of late on the role of blawgs in legal scholarship.
An August Legal Times article looked at the emerging academic trend of law professors' blawgs:
Does blogging contribute to the scholarship, teaching and service asked of legal academics? It's easy to see how blogging could contribute to the dissemination of knowledge. Can blogging also be a part of the process of discovering knowledge? If knowledge is discovered by the assertion and exploration of ideas, issues and opinions, through an iterative process of dialogue, critique and reformulation, blogging is making that contribution. The form may be different and the pace accelerated, but it still looks and feels like scholarly activity.
A September 17, 2007 a roundtable discussion was co-hosted by the National Law Journal and the Association of American Law Schools titled "Blogging, Scholarship and the Bench and Bar".
Law.com reported on the event. Lawrence Solum, who participated in the roundtable discussion, commented:
So let me just back up with some historical perspective, just to frame this issue. So what blogs represent is a change in communications technology, right? The blog is really just an engine, it can create any kind of content. Some should count, some shouldn't, but the idea that you wouldn't count publication on the Internet strikes me as ultimately sort of silly. The world of legal scholarship as it looked, say, 50 years ago was a world that was really driven by printing presses and by particular forms of scholarship: by the treatise, the great treatises.
Well, the Internet is just another step in that evolution. It's inevitable that you're going to give credit to publication in new electronic forms. Whether it's blogs or not, I think it's sort of early to tell. Blogs have been with us in a big way only for five or six years -- and will that be the form [of] legal publication five years from now? I don't know. I think that the key is content, right? It's not the form; it's not, is it a blog or is it on the Internet? It's what's being written.
We agree with Lawrence Solum - the Internet may well be the new millennium's equivalent of the printing press.
The consumer will ultimately decide how and where information is stored and obtained. As to how academia scores what "counts" and what does not, we'd suggest that peer review is no less an option with online publication, and we trust it will continue, where appropriate.
In the meanwhile, the blawgs are making all kinds of legal information available, as never before, and that is good for everyone.
- Annie Noa Kenet, Toronto
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