In the course of noting an apparent increase in citations to blogs in articles published in law reviews, Jack Balkin (Yale) remarks that the increasing rate of citation,
suggests that something very interesting is happening in legal scholarship. The legal academy is gradually becoming acclimated to blogs as vehicles of scholarship and scholarly quality.
Legal scholarship is really doomed if that is true! Alternatively, it reveals something very unflattering about what counts as legal "scholarship." In any case, this reminds me of an article by someone about "Why Blogs Are Bad for Legal Scholarship." Which I think is still true, even more so, if Balkin is right. (And notwithstanding my own very modest experiment with slightly more scholarly blogging, which really operates more like a listserve for like-minded scholars.)
Of course, blogs are the perfect medium for circulating information about the academic profession, and news and views about matters of little intellectual substance!
Recent Comments