Taxonomy Questions and Answers

I wanted to highlight a couple of responses I made to comments under this post. The first concerns law student blogs, and the second concerns foreign legal blogs.

What about law student blogs?: “Unfortunately, as I said in my main post, I am not including law student blogs. This is not because I have anything against them (I'm a law student blogger myself, obviously). It's simply a matter of practicality. Limiting my list to legal blogs by attorneys and law professors still leaves me with a tremendous amount of work to do. If I include law student blogs, it makes the project much more overwhelming. Law student blogs are simply harder to locate, and more difficult to classify.”

Exception: I will accept group blogs done by law students for a class (such as ip + internet).

What about non-U.S. legal blogs?: “I will not be incorporating foreign legal blogs. The reason is the same [as for not including law student blogs]: I have to draw some parameters in order to make this project realistic. If this were my full-time job it might be different, but as an Independent Study project in the midst of other 3L responsibilities, it's just too much for me to handle if I open up my taxonomy to non-US legal blogs. … [O]nce my final semester of law school is over (and the Bar, and my job searching), I plan to revise my list and taxonomy. I will hopefully then be able to include law student blogs and foreign legal blogs. I don't yet know whether this is realistic either, because it depends on what my future holds.”

Exception: I will accept legal blogs from Canada (such as Canadian Immigration Blawg).

Let me now answer two other questions readers have asked.

What about defunct blogs?

I received an excellent comment from fellow OSU-student blogger Ed Olszsewski (under this post). He clicked on a few of the links and noticed that several blogs were dormant. For the time being, I am including defunct (dormant, inactive) legal blogs on my list, even if they have not been updated in several months. I am not seeking them out (unlike active legal blogs), but I will include them in my list as I come across them. Some of them I will eventually exclude from my taxonomy, but others I will keep. At the moment my list is over-inclusive, but I will whittle it down over time. (I will also remove active blogs that aren’t sufficiently “legal.” Instapundit may be an example.)

Ed names the Harriet Miers’s Blog!!! as a defunct blog which might not be useful. But I will keep that one as an example of a “Humor/Parody Blog.”

Why do you use the term “legal blog” instead of “blawg”?

I answered that here. Briefly: 1) “blawg” is a contrived word that is not universally accepted by legal bloggers; and 2) “blawg” is a homonym with “blog,” so the words can’t be distinguished in a conversation.