Law X.0

Posts from Graduate Bloggers

This collection of blog posts by recent law school graduates is from Law School Roundup # 33 at divine angst:

    

You Know You Never Have to Go Back [to Law School] When...

• that fact makes you really happy (Barely Legal Blog)
• it's time to sign off (Buffalo Wings & Vodka)
• it's time to say goodbye (Three Years of Hell to Become the Devil)
• you wonder if it's time to sign off (the imbroglio)
• you get insured (by the seat of my skirt)
• you can afford new clothes (Collateral Evidence)
• you just got back from somewhere really cool (The Great Change: Turning Cathy into a Lawyer)
• you're babysitting a pig (Strict Scrutiny)
• you treat yourself to something special (Will Work for Favorable Dicta)

Congratulations for graduating and best wishes to all of them.

Blogging and the Future of Legal Scholarship

There is a fascinating collection of essays on “The Future of Legal Scholarship” at the Yale Law Journal Pocket Part, all of which are written by law professors who blog. The essays explore the ways in which the online world is changing the nature of legal scholarship.

    

The essays are:

• Let the Law Journal Be the Law Journal and the Blog Be the Blog, by Prof. Ann Althouse (Althouse)
• Online Legal Scholarship: The Medium and the Message, by Prof. Jack Balkin (Balkinization)
• A Blog Supreme?, by Prof. Christopher A. Bracey (Blackprof.com)
• The Long Tail of Legal Scholarship, by Prof. Paul Caron (TaxProf Blog) 
• That's So Six Months Ago: Challenges to Student Scholarship in the Age of Blogging, by Prof. Stephen I. Vladeck (PrawfsBlawg)
• Law Reviews, the Internet, and Preventing and Correcting Errors, by Prof. Eugene Volokh (Volokh Conspiracy) 

I learned of them via this post by Prof. Vladeck at PrawfsBlawg. It is worth pointing out that the print version (pdf) of Prof. Vladeck’s article has 39 footnotes (including 2 citations to 3L Epiphany), while the digital version contains active hyperlinks and thus requires no footnotes at all.

European Legal Blogging

The Law & Justice Blog is a Belgian blog that keeps excellent track of the European legal blogosphere. They have just celebrated their first anniversary. Congratulations to blogger Edwin Jacobs for all his work.

For those interested in European legal blogging, I recommend the Law & Justice post on What Legal Rules Are Applicable to Blogs?

Question for Visitors from University of Missouri

One great benefit of blogging is that the locations visitors come from can be instantly identified. This is an unprecedented development in the history of publishing. Anyone who has published an article in a traditional journal simply has no way of knowing whether someone was reading it earlier today. If someone did read it, there's no way of telling where the reader was located. A blog, on the other hand, allows the author to keep track of visitor locations, as well as referring URL's, domain names, and other interesting information. And the blogger's ability to update his blog allows him to quickly interact with specified readers. Hence this blog post.

According to my Sitemeter, I received several visitors today from the University of Missouri - Columbia. I assume they were from the law school, but they could have been from the main university. The domain name in each case was “missouri.edu,” and the IP addresses were very close to each other, as if they were located in a library computer lab.

I am hoping that someone from the Univ. of Missouri could let me know if anything specific caused them to visit. The referring URL’s were usually searches for “3L Epiphany” on Google or Yahoo. I am especially interested if this was a class visitation. Could any one of these readers let me know, what caused you to search for 3L Epiphany?

Whatever your reason, I won't reveal it on this blog without permission. Mostly, I'm just curious. My email address is on the top left corner, or you can leave a comment to this post. Much thanks to anyone who replies.

As an aside, I have a habit of collecting foreign locations of visitors to 3L Epiphany. Examples are here.

National Law Journal Article on Cases Citing Legal Blogs

My recent post on cases citing legal blogs has led to a National Law Journal article, now available online, entitled Judges Cite More Blogs in Rulings. I have inserted several hyperlinks within the two excerpts below (one of the benefits of blogging):

The ability to burrow deeply into a specialized area of the law with continuous updates has an undeniable appeal to practitioners. This phenomenon was not lost on Ian Best, a 36-year-old law school graduate who began a blog, "3L Epiphany," as an independent study project for academic credit at Ohio State University's Michael E. Moritz College of Law. It is a taxonomy of legal blogs. Best counted them, classified them and tracked their development.

"The most significant development is judges citing blogs," said Best, who lives in Columbus, Ohio, and is awaiting his bar exam results.

   

Best has found 32 citations of legal blogs in 27 different cases dating back to 2004. Perhaps the most noted was by Justice John Paul Stevens in his dissent in an important sentencing decision, United States v. Booker, 543 U.S. 220 (2005).

   

…

   

Many judges may remain reticent to cite something as potentially changeable as a blog, which may cease to exist or be taken over by someone new.

Best said those are legitimate concerns.

He pointed to a case that cited a blog for a song parody-but the online reference page no longer exists. Suboh v. Borgioli, 298 F. Supp. 2d 192 (D. Mass. 2004).

"One way of solving that is with hard copy publication," he said. "If citation becomes more prevalent there needs to be some hard copy that can be collected and official," he said. Blog authors should also keep a cited post unchanged for future researchers he said.

The article includes quotes from Prof. Doug Berman, Prof. Eugene Volokh, U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Diarmuid O'Scannlain (9th Circuit), and U.S. District Judge Sam Conti (San Francisco).