New Introduction to Academic Blogging Collection

A consistent theme of 3L Epiphany is that blogs are superior to traditional forms of legal scholarship in a multitude of ways. For this reason, I have:

• quoted a practitioner on why he prefers blogs to law reviews;
• demonstrated by hypothetical example the advantages that blogs have for timeliness;
• created “Footnote 123” as a perpetual online continuation of my otherwise-conventional student note; and
• predicted that law reviews will eventually incorporate blogs into their modus operandi, and that law students not on journal will form authoritative blogs of their own.

But most importantly, I collected numerous blog posts and online articles on the topic of "Academic Blogging" and made them available as an online resource. One of the advantages of a blog is that it can assemble a tremendous amount of material from different places, localize them in one spot, and make them instantly available to the reader. But a counteracting disadvantage is that the localized collection can disappear from view as new material is added to the hosting blog.

The collection on "Academic Blogging" is one example of how a conversation in the blogosphere can be compiled, organized and structured. (And this matter of blogospheric structure is another theme of 3L Epiphany.) Yet the difficulty a reader would have in locating such a collection, even on this very blog where it was first displayed, manifests a limitation to the medium that will need to be addressed if blogging is to become a sophisticated form of academic scholarship.

Because a new Wall Street Journal article on law reviews has reinvigorated the discussion over whether blogging is an acceptable medium for legal scholarship, I am re-posting the entire compendium on "Academic Blogging" below. My hope is that new readers will discover and appreciate the insights offered by all of this diverse material. I believe that the compendium itself is a prime example of the advantages blogs enjoy over traditional scholarship, including law reviews.

In the context of the WSJ article, I would single out three articles from the collection as being particularly on-point regarding the relationship between blogs and law reviews. These articles are:

• Blogging, Legal Scholarship, and Academic Careers, Larry Solum (January 9, 2006): link
• Bridging the Divide Between the Blogsphere and Law Reviews, Liz Aloi (October 29, 2005): link
• Why Blogs Will Not Replace Law Reviews, Orin Kerr (July 6, 2005): link

I have re-posted "Academic Blogging" below in three separate sections to avoid formatting difficulties. Unfortunately the section numbers are reversed from the numbers in the URL's (another blogging frustration). If readers would like the collection as one complete post, they can go to the original here. The sections of the re-posted version are listed here:

Academic Blogging

• Section 1
• Section 2
• Section 3