Law X.0

Experiment #1: The Floating Opinion

This post contains one sentence which will be here for only 30 minutes. It’s the last sentence of the post, and it’s in bold.

If the sentence is still there at the end of this post, you are one of a very few people who will have read it. You may even be the only one. I will tell you what to do with that sentence, and you will be part of my first 3L Epiphany Experiment.

I am going to make a controversial statement. It is about nothing major or important, but it will strike some people as XXXX. What I am going to do is give my honest opinion of a particular XXXX that a lot of people XXXX. You could even call the XXXX a XXXX. I’m posting my opinion of XXXX on this blog for 30 minutes.

If the sentence is there at the end, please do the following

Copy this post, with the sentence and explanation, to a document. Then send this post to a non-law related blogger that you know and trust. If you don’t know of any such bloggers, do a Google search and find one that looks like it might be a good place to send this. Ask the blogger if he can post the sentence for a little while. But the blogger should not post this explanation, nor name me as the source. You can send this whole explanation so that the blogger understands what I’m doing, but he should only post the one sentence, and he can then comment on the sentence if he wants to.

I’m asking that this sentence only be sent or posted at a non-legal blog, because people who read 3L Epiphany also visit other law blogs (“blawgs”) and will probably figure it out if they see this sentence on a blawg.

If you are a non-law blogger reading this, feel free to put it on your blog. But again, do not identify me as its source and do not post this explanation. Just say, “I read this somewhere,” etc. You can add, “I agree/disagree with this because….” and say whatever you want to. You can even quote the sentence as if it were your own words, and I won't take issue with it. But don’t name 3L Epiphany yet, not because I’m ashamed of the sentence, or because I’m intimidated by anyone who disagrees with it, but because I want to see if this sentence will “float” on the Internet for awhile. I’m going to see where this sentence goes on the Internet after appearing here for 30 minutes.

In one month, I will see if I can locate that sentence on the Internet somewhere. I want to see where it has traveled, and if it has multiplied. Perhaps the sentence will be on a particular blog, but will have passed into the archives (traveling back in time, and then being recovered). Or perhaps it will have traveled from blog to blog, leaving a trail behind it. Or maybe it will disappear from the Internet, and no-one but myself will ever know its content.

If a non-law blogger likes this idea, he can send the sentence with the explanation to other bloggers (if they’re not “blawgers”). These other non-law bloggers can also post the sentence, and sent it along to other bloggers as well. My hope is that no blogger will ruin this by posting the explanation with the sentence. The only people who will read the explanation (but without the sentence) are the ones who read this post here at 3L Epiphany. Readers of the blogs who participate will not know where the sentence about XXXX comes from, or that it is part of an experiment.

Again, bloggers who like this idea can send this post to other bloggers, ad infinitum, but with the same instructions: Do not post the explanation on your blog, only the sentence and whatever context you want to put around it. Do not identify 3L Epiphany as the source, or make it easy to figure out that this is an experiment. But you can do whatever else you want (criticize or approve the sentence, make it your own opinion but use the exact same words, etc.). And I will look for that sentence exactly one month from now. If I find the sentence, I will disclose it. I will also link to the blogs and locations where I found it.

If you are reading this, and you know the sentence, consider yourself an honored guest who is part of a significant experiment. Thanks for visiting.

Here’s the sentence:

[Sentence deleted.]

Update 1: Bloggers who participate may feel free to quote each other. It might seem strange if a bunch of bloggers all start commenting on the same thing using the same words. So they can quote and link to each other if they prefer. But please use the same words, and don't yet name 3L Epiphany as the source.

Update 2: Besides crossing out words in this post that might give the sentence away, I also made some changes based on a reader comment. I’d like to thank him for his observation. I removed his comment because it gave his website address, which includes a blogroll and thus names possible participants.

Update 3: By the way, I will soon conduct this exact same experiment using "blawgs." It will run simultaneously, but overlap, with this initial experiment using non-law blogs. I will re-post the entire experiment and disclose the missing sentence and crossed-out words. I will leave it up for 30 minutes, and then see if/how it travels on law-blogs. But I won't say when.

Futuristic Summer Job Update

I am adding an update to my earlier post on a Futuristic Summer Job, where I recommended that law students who do not yet have a summer job consider working as an RA for a professor who blogs. Because that post was a typically long one, I’m putting the update here as a brand new post.

If any law student follows through with my advice, and gets an RA job for a professor-blogger this summer, please let me know. Right now I don’t think it will be that hard to find such a job, although even some professor-bloggers might be skeptical of its value. I predict that eventually, perhaps years from now, such jobs will actually become competitive. Incidentally, if your current semester has a lighter load, you might see if you can start working as a blog-RA now and do something more traditional over the summer.

Also, if any law professor reads this and thinks it's a great idea (or a lousy one), please feel free to make your opinions known.

Update (to the update): I also believe that this can be a model for other disciplines, and expect that eventually students in graduate, business, and medical schools will seek out work with academic bloggers for the sake of learning the skills involved. The benefit to law students is distinctive, however, because such work will also prepare them to “shape” the law of blogging.

Advice on Transferring and Other Matters

Here is advice on transferring law schools from Jeremy Richey (via Blawg Wisdom, a site I learned of via Ambivalent Imbroglio). The subject of transferring is outside of my expertise, but the advice sounds good for people who are thinking about it.

There’s also advice on Blawg Wisdom about handling your grades, submitting writing samples, and other topics. 

Something I intend to do over the weekend is post some student notes from an advice session held by three OSU professors, for students who have the “1L Blues” after getting their grades. The advice is excellent (although not official), and I will post it soon after some more brief editing.

Thanks also to Ambivalent Imbroglio and Jeremy Richey for the links. There are other law student bloggers who have linked to me, and I’ll try to refer readers to them when I can. Besides just returning a favor (whether it's considered a favor or not), it is also a demonstration of the strange loop-de-loop world of the blogosphere, which is a theme I intend to discuss a lot on this blog. (“Please don’t,” comes the reply. I know. But I have to.)

Futuristic Summer Job

This will be a long post. “So what else is new?” you reply. If you don’t want to read a lot, just skip down to the bold sentence below.

I would like to make a suggestion to law students who are in their first or second year. No doubt you are concerned about summer employment, unless you already have a job. One of the peculiarities of law school is that you have to invest so much time in seeking a future position while in the midst of an academic workload that is already unbearable. But there is a better way...

Last summer, the one between my 2L and 3L years, I worked as a research assistant (RA) for Prof. Doug Berman. He has referred to my work for him here (third paragraph). This is not a typical thing to do during your second summer of law school. Most students seek something that is more marketable than being an RA for a professor, especially since many law firms and government agencies hire directly from their own pools of summer clerks for post-graduation employment.

My situation was somewhat unique, in that I already knew I had a solid part-time job for my first semester of my 3L year, working at the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Ohio. This was a competitive enough position that I wasn’t completely worried about explaining my lack of a more typical second-summer job to a future potential employer. (As an aside, I am fairly certain that one of the reasons I got the job in the US Attorney’s office was because I was very familiar with sentencing law, after becoming a constant reader of Prof. Berman’s blog.)

Before that summer, during the second semester of my 2L year (and especially towards the end), I studied like a madman to get a solid GPA. But that didn’t allow enough time to do sufficient job seeking. So once my exams were over, I had done well but was still unemployed. I received a few interviews, but they either didn’t lead to a job, or the interviewing firm became preoccupied and kept me waiting because they weren’t yet able to fill the position.

I knew that I could work for Prof. Berman, because I had worked for him as an RA before, considered him a truly excellent mentor, and had mentioned to him ahead of time the possibility of being his summer RA.

My decision not to spend more time looking for a "real job," but instead to work as an RA that summer, was a gamble. But I knew the work I was doing as an RA would have value in the long run, because it consisted of mainly two things:

1. Transferring the content of the Sentencing Law and Policy blog to a more permanent collection on the Moritz Law (OSU) website. For specific examples of my work, see here, here, and here. If you don’t know Blakely and Booker, I’ll explain later.

2. Drafting a proposal for a new Sentencing Website which would utilize all the various forms of Internet communication, including web-forums, online resource collections, static websites, and blogs of all kinds. (I will make this proposal available for downloading shortly.)

Although I expected this work to have significance, the process of carrying out these projects made me recognize the astonishing untapped potential of blogs as a transformative resource within the legal profession. And it also allowed me to recognize that some lawyers and law firms could see something on the horizon. Namely, that blogs are going to be a major vehicle in the next century for legal research, writing, networking, and marketing. In fact, they already are.

It is my opinion that any law student who learns how to blog will have a distinctive advantage over those who haven’t yet learned. I believe that this advantage is similar to, but greater than, the knowledge of a foreign language. And it’s easier to learn.

This post is long enough in explanation. So law students, here is my suggestion. And please don’t do this in an impulsive or whimsical way, but think about it for awhile. Talk to your professors and career service counselors about whether this works for you.

Here is a list of law professors who blog, along with their locations. [Update: My original post linked to an older list. This one is a new list and includes more professors.]

My suggestion is this: If you attend a law school with one of these professors, ask them if you can spend your next summer helping them with their blog. Take advantage of an opportunity to work with a professor who already knows what’s involved. You will begin to pick up a taste for how blogs allow communication beyond traditional limitations, including of the “ivory tower” variety.

The professor may have plenty of ideas about how you can help with his* blog. It may be writing brief case summaries for posting, on which the professor can provide further analysis. It may be reading other legal blogs and selecting worthwhile content, to which the professor can add his own perspective. Perhaps you will learn as I did the unexpected difficulties, both stylistically and structurally, of transferring blog material into a more permanent collection. Your professor may even ask you to learn the skills of blogging so that his own blog can be improved.

Needless to say, you won't get paid the same amount as if you were working at a law firm. But the skills you learn, and the experiences you have with the medium, will generate their own reward. And the law firm that you didn’t apply to for summer employment will one day be looking for a lawyer who knows how to blog.

If you attend one of the surprisingly many law schools without a professor who blogs, choose a favorite professor, go to his office, and say kindly, “I have an idea that will help you enter into the 21^st century.” You can describe what you know about blogs, and how they can benefit the professor. And now you can add, “By the way, I was also thinking of an Independent Study project next year.”

* PC readers, please change “his” to “his/her” in your own mind. It just doesn’t read as well. As Winston Churchill said, “In English, the male embraces the female.”

A Bunch of Posts are Coming

I've been somewhat preoccupied, but tomorrow I will be posting much more than I have been today. Among other things, I will explain what I meant by this.

Where Am I? Find Out Now

If you would like to see where I am right now as I post this on my blog, beginning with a view of the Earth from outer space and then narrowing to my location at Moritz College of Law (OSU), please follow these instructions. Trust me on this one, it’s worth it just to see how it works. Unfortunately you will have to download a program, but it’s from Google and shouldn’t cause any problems.

1. Go to earth.google.com.
2. Click on “Get Google Earth (free version).”
3. Download the program onto your computer.
4. Install and open the Google Earth program.
5. You will see a satellite image of the Earth.
6. At the top left corner, enter: 55 West 12th Avenue, Columbus, Ohio.
7. As the building appears in your viewpoint, you will see on your left "Mirror Lake," which is a very pleasant spot on the OSU campus with a sign that says "Don't Feed the Ducks" but gives insufficient notice.
8. The building right below the address on the satellite screen is Moritz College of Law, on the Ohio State University campus. You can identify it by an extension that juts out of the north-west corner.
9. Put your cursor (hand) on the building and click a few times. It will provide a closer view.
10. When I myself did this, the screen showed three red cars in the parking lot. My library study carrel is not far from an aisle that leads to a window overlooking the parking lot. I walked over to a window on the west-side of the building, and those red cars were still there.
11. If you click on Moritz College a couple more times, you will see a white rectangle on the top left corner, and under it a dark line separating white from a mixture of green and purple.
12. At the moment I am posting this (5 pm) I am in the middle and to the right of that dark line, in my library study carrel.

Update: I've done the same thing at 9 pm in the evening, and I see the same picture I saw earlier. So obviously that can't possibly mean it's a live view. Yet those red cars were there, so either it was just a coincidence that there were three red cars in similar spots, or the satellite photo was taken at a certain time of the day and saved. In any case, it's still an incredible program for seeing your actual location by satellite.

More Updates:

• If you've downloaded the program, try entering in one address (i.e. where you are now) and then a second address (i.e. where you were born). The way it responds is very impressive.
• Google has also included some particular attractions (the Grand Canyon, the Eiffel Tower, the Forbidden City, etc.).
• I was looking at some streets in Chicago, and the image showed where a car crash had occurred, which was delaying traffic at that very moment (info posted by a Google user).

Hello Brazil

A reader from Brazil is here right now. Thanks for coming! You're the first one here from South America. I hope you like what you see.

Eventually I will try to translate some of my posts into Spanish, and send them to Spanish law blogs in South America. But I'm not sure I can do that in Porteuguese, Brazil's language.

For readers who have been following these location updates, that means I have received visitors from every continent except Antarctica. My blog is not yet two weeks old. So, sounding like a broken record, this shows the extraordinary capabilities of law student blogs for near-instantaneous communication on an unprecedented scale.

Update: My Brazilian visitor came here after reading this post at Legal Theory Blog. Thank you, Prof. Solum, for the link.

D.C. Bar Article on Legal Blogging

I linked earlier to an article in DC Bar.org from April 2005 by Sarah Kellogg, entitled “Do You Blog?” I found this and numerous others articles on “blawgs” at Bill Gratsch’s site, www.blawg.org.

Here are some quotes from the introduction:

“‘You could tell early on that web logs would be very appealing to lawyers because we’re uniquely suited to doing this,’ says [Denise] Howell …. ‘Lawyers are trained to write … and research. The writing they generate tends to have some credibility behind it. That is the crux of web logging right there.’”

…

“Experts say that attorneys will find more than companionship in the blogosphere, noting that blogs can boost legal practices, assist in legal research, and turn every attorney into an instant cyberexpert in his or her practice area.

“‘Blogs allow for easy access to information and make it easier for lawyers with similar practice interests to get in contact with each other,” says Stephanie Tai, an appellate environmental litigator for the federal government and cocreator of the Blawg Review, which tracks articles and commentaries in law review journals. “I think it helps overcome a lot of the hierarchy present in the profession as well. Because of my blog, I’ve been able to correspond with various law professors who I don’t think I would’ve come into contact with otherwise.’

“Yet cyberspace and blogging hold their own pitfalls for legal professionals. That’s because, though posting one’s opinions to the World Wide Web can be heady stuff, mistakes made as the world watches can be far-reaching and difficult to erase. And the ethics rules governing lawyers are far more stringent than those (practically none) governing bloggers who write about politics, the environment, or chess.

“Still, legal professionals of every kind, not just technolawyers, say the risks are worth the rewards. Blogs provide an opportunity to break free of the traditions and limits of the legal profession, enhancing the practice of law in the digital age.”

The article then proceeds to give a brief history of blogs in general, and then notes that blogs have benefits over traditional websites:

“As the technology took hold, popular blogs soon earned a reputation as provocative or funny journals about pop culture, politics, and technology. It was clear to early constituents that the medium had the power to create cyberspace communities as distinct as towns, cities, and states.

“Compared to a web site, a blog remains a cheaper and more fluid vehicle for communicating on the web. By forgoing the bells and whistles its web site kin features—databases that allow for extensive searching, for instance—the blog can be a quicker and easier content management tool. A blog can be updated a dozen times a day, if necessary. Even the hippest web sites are considered stodgy by bloggers; they say web sites lack the freewheeling enterprise of blogs, which can spark a worldwide debate in a flash.”

Then the article proceeds to discuss blogs in the context of the legal profession:

“The greatest contribution blogs may make to the legal profession is their ability to reveal talent and expertise often hidden in courtrooms and boardrooms. Blogs excel at getting the word out, and observers say lawyers who embrace them are bound to be rewarded with fans and fame.

“Instead of waiting for months or years to be published in a legal journal or magazine, attorneys can pen a short article or commentary expressing their views on any range of subjects, dramatically cutting the time it takes to reach colleagues and the public.

“The blogosphere is teeming with topic-specific blogs that have won kudos from legal experts for their ability to supply timely information that is unique and hard to find.”

The article discusses many of the benefits of legal blogging. Blogs are:

• useful to law students for observing what practitioners really think about the law.

• advantageous to solo and small firm practitioners, who are the ones “best situated to take advantage of reputation-builder blogs.”

• beneficial in exploring new potential areas of practice, providing “a way to strike out and explore a legal interest that may have been little more than a hobby to this point.”

• ideal for legal research, because “they can be used to monitor evolving legal issues, uncover answers to arcane legal questions, or find far-flung experts across the continent.”

• a growing method of client recruitment through “allow[ing] lawyers to showcase their past work and their potential.”

• constructive to communicating with clients, keeping them “up-to-date on their cases or educat[ing] them about a firm’s skills and experience.”

But there are pitfalls to legal blogging. For example, blogs are:

• potentially a mixture of advertisement and solicitation that can cross ethical and regulatory lines.

• confusing as to what constitutes actual legal advice.

• risky in the areas of client confidentiality and conflicts of interest.

• inaccurate (and even sanctionable) if the law is different in a reader’s jurisdiction.

This summary doesn’t do justice to a very informative article. I would recommend that people read the whole thing.

The following blogs are referred to in the article:

Adam Smith, Esq. - link

Bag and Baggage - link

The Common Scold - link

Dennis Kennedy - link

Ernie the Attorney - link

Inter Alia - link

Jim Calloway’s Law Practice Tips Blog - link

My Shingle - link

The [non]billable hour - link

Reid My Blog! - link

SCOTUSblog - link

The Trademark Blog - link

Underneath Their Robes - link

The Volokh Conspiracy - link

Are Blogs Superior to Law Reviews?

This practitioner commenting here thinks so. (His comment is in regard to reading law professor blogs, not maintaining a blog of his own.):

"Blogs are better for me than L.Rev.s will ever be, in these ways:

1. I need speed. Often, we have a pending appeal that raises the same issues as a USSC case, so we need to do a supplemental brief, or adjust a brief-in-progress, and blogs that give us ideas are great…

2. I need easy-to-digest bites. Sorry, but we don't all have time to read your academic masterpieces.

3. I need a focus on what the law is or conceivably might be in my near future. I like insights into where the Supreme Court's jurisprudence is actually headed, not a Grand Unified Theory of what-might-be if 6 Justices retire and are replaced by Critical Legal Theorists or something.

4. I like being able to jump in discussions, and having other practitioners jump in as well…."

New Locations (and an Explanation)

I am adding some new locations of visitors, and other blog-details, below. This is an update of the list posted earlier.

Just to be clear, I’m not posting this to be self-aggrandizing. I’m merely keeping track of these developments for the sake of demonstrating the unique nature of the blogosphere. In the space of a few days my blog has traveled across the U.S. and Canada, and oversees to Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia. My reference to these locations is for the sake of illustrating the remarkable capability of this new form of global communication.

I fully realize that people aren’t going to keep coming back to this site just to see how far it’s traveled or what my latest statistics are. I’m just keeping track of this at the beginning to show the potential value of maintaining a law student blog. The amount of time between 3L Epiphany being completely unknown, predicting a potential blogstorm, and observing the escalating traffic with this post, is miniscule compared to the number of readers and the diversity of their locations. And I will therefore keep repeating that law students benefit from entering this new universe.

States

• Connecticut
• Kentucky
• Maine
• Mississippi
• Oklahoma
• South Dakota
• Utah

Canadian Provinces

• Alberta
• British Columbia
• Ontario

Countries

• Ireland
• Norway

More Details

• I’ve been visited by someone in New Orleans, which is good to know. I hope the person is doing well.
• I have been named one of the most popular blogs today at blawgrepublic.
• I have begun to receive several readers via Google searches.

Thanks to Law Prof Bloggers

I would like to thank the following law professor bloggers for linking to my site:

• Prof. Doug Berman at Sentencing Law and Policy. (I will have much more to say later about the various ways Prof. Berman’s blog influenced my decision to begin this Independent Study.)

• Prof. Gerry Beyer at Wills, Trusts, and Estates Prof Blog.   

• Prof. Michael Froomkin at Discourse.net (whom I mentioned earlier here).

• Prof. Dan Markel at Prawfsblawg.

• Prof. Gordon Smith at The Conglomerate.

• Prof. Daniel J. Solove at Concurring Opinions.

Many visitors from these sites are coming for the collection of blogs posts and articles on Academic Blogging. I have also added a brief Addendum to that collection and a request for more such posts here.

Welcome to a Tanzanian Visitor

At this moment (8:30 am) someone is reading this blog from Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania. Welcome to this site. You're my first reader from Africa. Thanks for coming.

The Incredible Growing Blogosphere

David Sifrey, the founder and CEO of Technorati, has posted a "State of the Blogosphere" at Sifry's Alerts. The results of his reseach include these stunning facts:

• There are now 27.2 million blogs in existence.
• The blogosphere is 60 times larger than it was 3 years ago.
• The blogosphere is doubling in size every 5 and a 1/2 months.
• Over 75,000 new weblogs are created every day.
• On average, a weblog is created every second of every day.
• There are 1.2 million new blog posts each day, or about 50,000 per hour.

It seems obvious that law students would be well-advised to prepare themselves for blogging, and for studying (and developing) the nascent law of blogging.

Location of Visitors to this Site

My "launch day" was Feb. 1st and 2nd. Since then I have received visitors from the following places:

States

• Alabama

• Arizona

• California

• Colorado

• Delaware

• District of Columbia

• Florida

• Georgia

• Idaho

• Illinois

• Indiana

• Kansas

• Louisiana

• Maryland

• Massachusetts

• Michigan

• Minnesota

• Missouri

• Nevada

• New Jersey

• New Mexico

• New York

• North Carolina

• Ohio

• Oregon

• Pennsylvania

• South Carolina

• Texas

• Vermont

• Virginia

• Washington

• West Virginia

• Wisconsin

Countries

• Australia

• Canada

• England (UK)

• Germany

• Japan

• Netherlands

• Scotland (UK)

• Slovenia

• Sweden

The past two days I have received just short of 1,000 visits, although no doubt sometimes from the same people. Probably more people have read my blog in the last week than would read a law review article of mine in a century. Of course, the content of this blog is not up to the standard of a law review article. But clearly there is something impressive about a medium that can lead to so much attention so quickly. Based on the blogs I have seen among lawyers and law firms, it is becoming increasingly obvious to those in the legal profession that blogging allows outreach on an unprecedented scale. The reason I listed these states and countries is to verify that reality.

Lawyer Blogger Link

I’ve received my first link from a lawyer blogger, Tech Law Advisor (although I can’t tell from his about page whether he’s currently practicing). This is interesting, because I did not yet inform any legal practitioners about this blog.

He had this to say: “3L Epiphany is getting credit for blogging -- which I guess means that he's actually paying the law school to blog.” 

I have to admit that I never thought of it that way.

Addendum to Academic Blogging

Here are a couple of other articles on the subject of Academic Blogging that were not in the original list:

• An informative overview of blogging and the “Google effect,” by Prof. Roger Alford at Opinio Juris, entitled The Megaphone of Blogging.

• An article from graduate student Rebecca Goetz, in the Chronicle of Higher Education, entitled Do Not Fear the Blog.

Rebecca’s article is one of several reacting to the pseudonymous Prof. Tribble, who criticized academic blogs here and here. Reactions from professor-bloggers to Tribble's articles are here, here, here, and here. In my collection of posts and articles on Academic Blogging, Prof. Tribble’s articles appear under the “Chronicle of Higher Education,” and the four posts from (non-law) professors are under “Cliopatra et al.”

I am currently seeking new articles and blog posts on the topic of “Academic Blogging,” especially concerning the matter of whether blogging is a legitimate form of scholarship. (My personal opinion is easy to guess.) Readers may feel free to suggest additions in the Comments.

Paradoxical Movie Analogy

I would like to analogize metablogging (i.e. blogging about blogging) to a brilliant scene in an otherwise lousy movie.

The movie was “Spaceballs,” a Mel Brooks parody of Star Wars. It’s really not worth watching. But there was a particular scene that struck me (and others) as kind of ingenious.

In that scene, a couple of the characters (one of them is a pseudo-Vader) are in trouble and deciding what they should do next. They are in some kind of crisis and need to make a quick decision. But they have reached an impasse and don’t know how to proceed.

Then it occurs to one of them that they have a movie video collection, and one of the videos is “Spaceballs.” That is, they have a copy of the very movie in which they are appearing. So they decide to insert the video, and fast-forward to a place later in the movie where they can see what decision they made and what the consequences were. (If the consequences were bad, they could always change their decision, but of course that would mean the copy of the movie they were watching would be changed.)

So one of the characters fast-forwards the movie, stops it randomly, and presses play. And it turns out that they have started the movie at exactly the same scene in which they are looking at the movie. The two characters look at the screen, and are watching themselves look at the screen, watching themselves looking at the screen, etc. You see an endless series of video screens, with the characters watching themselves. Then the characters look at the camera, and you see all the smaller versions of their characters looking at the camera. And they look back and forth, from the video screen, back to the camera, temporarily paralyzed by the existential ramifications.

It’s only a brief scene, and perhaps you had to be there, but it was the only memorable moment of an otherwise forgettable film. And there is something about that paradox, of watching yourself watch yourself, that applies to blogging.

At this instant right now I am blogging, and of course I am blogging about blogging (about blogging, etc). I’m not trying to be clever, and I’m not a philosopher, but I think there is something metaphysical and transcendental about this. Yet the paradox has practical applications.

If the essence of that one fleeting scene, with all of the profound implications it entails, can be even briefly captured by this blog, then I believe that 3LEpiphany will have served a useful purpose.

How is this analogy practically applicable? I’ll explain soon.

The Global Blogosphere

A sitemeter (on the left, available for free here) records useful information. For example, 96% of my visits are from the US, and 1% from the UK. No surprise there. But I have also received visits (1% each) from Japan, Australia, and an “Unknown Country.” 3LEpiphany, taking over the world one country at a time. Hopefully the reader in an unknown country is a law student, thinking, “Now that’s not a bad idea….”

But on a serious and meta-blogging note, this does reveal the global nature of the blogosphere. A lawyer, law professor, or law student who puts up a blog is potentially engaging with readers across the world. If just one Japanese blogger links to me, eventually this could be picked up by other bloggers in Japan, and then news of this blog may travel throughout Southeast Asia. I will try to keep track of where this blog "travels," and report my findings.

At this stage I can already draw an obvious but important conclusion: A blog will get you noticed in unlikely places, in a way that traditional forms of communication never can. That may not always be a good thing, depending on the content of a person's blog, although I have no worries about this one. (I'm not giving out legal advice or anything similarly problematic.) But if you think that this development is a benificial aspect of globalization, then blog away. 

Update: That's funny. Based on reading Sitemeter more closely, I have discovered that Canada is the "Unknown Country." Readers can feel free to comment about the international implications of this event below.

A Preview of Coming Attractions

Because the previous post on Academic Blogging was a major one, and because I am aware of law professor bloggers who intend to link to it tomorrow, I am going to refrain from moving it too far down with a bunch of new postings. Incidentally, I wish I knew how to enlarge the side margins of this blog, and I especially wish I could arrange for long posts to be turned into a few initial paragraphs followed by a "Continue Reading" link. That way interested readers could dive beneath the blog-surface, and the front page would not become one long stream of prose. Unfortunately my basic Typepad service does not seem to include these features, but perhaps I'm just ignorant of what's available. Any Typepad users who get the basic level of service, feel free to inform me if these features can be utilized. I suppose you could call this my first "bleg."

Here is what I plan on blogging about soon (if not tomorrow):

• This article from DC Bar.org discussing legal practitioner blogs with their pros and cons.
• An explanation of how this Independent Study came to fruition.
• Links to more websites that have recommended 3L Epiphany, with the appropriate expressions of gratitude.
• A brief analysis of statistics indicating the origins of traffic to this site.
• Lessons learned from my first few days of blogging.
• A meta-blogging analogy from a lousy movie with a single brilliant scene.

So stay tuned...

Academic Blogging Collection

I have compiled a collection of blog posts and articles on the subject of “Academic Blogging.” I have divided them up according to the blog or online journal in which they appeared, and then followed blog protocol by listing them in reverse chronological order. The majority of the blog posts are from law professor “blawgs,” but a few are from other academic disciplines. I fully realize that this collection, completed two weeks ago, is already outdated and that there are new discussions going on. But I believe that this compendium indicates the growing importance and sophistication of the legal academic blogosphere. In this context it is relevant to ask whether law student blogs will also achieve greater respectability, and contribute something of value to legal scholarship.

My intention is to demonstrate the value in organizing and structuring conversations from the blogosphere. These blog posts and articles offer extremely significant insights into the nature of academic blogging. This compendium fixes these insights into one readily accessible location, so that this resource can provide a foundation for future discussions.

I have also made available a Word document for downloading, containing all of the posts and articles with their URL's. I would like to thank the professors who contributed to this project and who offered me further suggestions.

Blog_Posts_and_Articles_on_Academic_Blogging

Academic Blogging

A Collection of Blog Posts and Articles

I. American Constitution Society Blog

Bridging the Divide Between the Blogsphere and Law Reviews, Liz Aloi (Oct. 29, 2005): link

II. Althouse

Where are the women lawprof bloggers?, Ann Althouse (Jan. 09, 2006): link

Blogging: is it serious or fun?, Ann Althouse (Aug. 2, 2005): link

Academic blog controversies, Ann Althouse (Nov. 16, 2005): link

III. Balkinization

More Proof that Blogging Can Be a Form of Scholarship, Jack Balkin (Sept. 29, 2005): link

IV. Becker-Posner Blog

Introduction to the Becker-Posner Blog, Richard Posner (Dec. 5, 2004): link

V. The Chronicle of Higher Education

The Blogosphere as a Carnival of Ideas, Henry Farrell (Oct. 7, 2005): link

They Shoot Messengers, Don’t They?, Ivan Tribble (pseud.) (Sept. 2, 2005): link

Bloggers Need Not Apply, Ivan Tribble (pseud.) (July 8, 2005): link

VI. Cliopatria et al [History]

My Colleagues Speak Up…, Ralph E. Luker (Sept. 14, 2005): link

The Tribble Fall-Out, and what we can do about it, Rebecca Goetz (Sept. 13, 2005): link

Me and Professor Tribble, Mark Grimsley (Sept. 5, 2005): link

More Tribble, More Troubles, Miriam Burstein (Sept. 4, 2005): link

VII. Concurring Opinions

Blogging Without Tenure, Daniel J. Solove (Jan. 9, 2006): link

Blog Posts: Conversation or Publication?, Daniel J. Solove (Nov. 1, 2005): link

Editing the Blogosphere, Daniel J. Solove (Oct. 30, 2005): link

Why Blogging Is Good, Daniel J. Solove (Oct. 6, 2005): link

VIII. Conglomerate

(Sigh) Women & Blogging, Part 72, Christine Hurt (Jan. 8, 2006): link

To Delete or Not to Delete?, Christine Hurt (Oct. 30, 2005): link

Improving on the Perfection of Blogs, Christine Hurt (Aug. 2, 2005): link

IX. Crooked Timber

Blogging and Tenure, Henry Farrell (Jan. 10, 2006): link

Academic Blogging, Brian Weatherson (Sept. 14, 2005): link

Blogging and Academic Jobs, Henry Farrell (Sept. 14, 2005): link

X. DanielDrezner [Political Science]

So I See There’s An Article in Slate, Daniel Drezner (Nov. 18, 2005): link

So Friday was a Pretty Good Day…, Daniel Drezner (Nov. 5, 2005): link

Seven Days Later…, Daniel Drezner (Oct. 14, 2005): link

So Friday Was a Pretty Bad Day, Daniel Drezner (Oct. 8, 2005): link

Grad students: no blogs allowed, Daniel Drezner (July 8, 2005): link

Can academics be bloggers? Daniel Drezner (Mar. 13, 2005): link

Here Goes Nothing, Daniel Drezner (Sept. 10, 2002): link

XI. Ideoblog

Blogging: distraction from what?, Larry Ribstein (Jan. 9, 2006): link

Blogging and scholarly productivity, Larry Ribstein (Oct. 11, 2005): link

Blogging, tenure and the incentives of tenure committees, Larry Ribstein (Oct. 11, 2005): link

The Drezner tenure denial, Larry Ribstein (Oct. 11, 2005): link

Do Bloggers Just Want to Have Fun?, Larry Ribstein (Aug. 2, 2005): link

Blogging and tenure, Larry Ribstein (June 22, 2005): link

Blogging as academic publishing, Larry Ribstein (Apr. 12, 2005): link

XII. Insider Higher Ed.com

Notes from the Underground, Scott McLemee (Jan. 18, 2006): link

XIII. Instapundit

Blogging and Legal Scholarship, Glenn Reynolds (Jan. 8, 2006): link

Misconceptions, Glenn Reynolds (Sept. 6, 2004): link

Can a Blog Entry Count as Scholarship, Glenn Reynolds (June 17, 2003): link

Little Things, Glenn Reynolds (Tech Central Station) (Feb. 20, 2002): link

XIV. JohnHawks.net [Anthropology]

Hawks in Slate on blogging and tenure, John Hawks (Nov. 17, 2005): link

XV. Legal Theory Blog

Blogging, Legal Scholarship, and Academic Careers, Larry Solum (Jan. 9, 2006): link

XVI. Leiter Reports

Is the Internet Hurting Scholarship?, Brian Leiter (Apr. 20, 2005): link

Posner on blogs, Brian Leiter (Dec. 6, 2004): link

More on Academic Credit for Blogging, Brian Leiter (Jan. 9, 2004): link

Academic Credit for Law Blogging?, Brian Leiter (Jan. 9, 2004): link

XVII. PrawfsBlawg

Scholarship or Distraction?, Dan Markel (Jan. 9, 2006): link

More thoughts about blogs as a law professor’s medium, Doug Berman (Aug. 3, 2005): link

Topical versus generalist blogging, Kaimi Wenger (Aug. 2, 2005): link

More on the academic value of blogging, Rick Garnett (Aug. 2, 2005): link

Bloggership? On Blogs as Scholarship and Academic Blogging, Daniel Solove (Aug. 2, 2005): link

How might we improve blogs as an academic medium?, Doug Berman (Aug. 1, 2005): link

Blogs and Academic Disciplines, Ron Wright (July 29, 2005): link

Blogarship? Scholarlog?, David Zaring (July 6, 2005): link

Law Professor Blogger Census (Version 2.0), Daniel Solove (June 16, 2005): link

Should Law Schools Subsidize Blogging? For SSRN’s sake?, Dan Markel (Apr. 12, 2005): link

XVIII. Professor Bainbridge

Blogging and Tenure, Stephen Bainbridge (Oct. 13, 2005): link

Bloggers Just Wanna Have Fun, Stephen Bainbridge (Aug. 1, 2005): link

Academic credit for blogging, Stephen Bainbridge (Jan. 7, 2004): link

Blogging as Academic Work, Stephen Bainbridge (Aug. 3, 2005): link

XIX. Slate

Attack of the Career-Killing Blogs, Robert S. Boynton (Nov. 16, 2005): link

XX. TaxProf Blog

Blogging: Scholarship or Distraction?, Paul Caron (Jan. 8, 2006): link

XXI. The Volokh Conspiracy

Blogging and Scholarship, Randy Barnett (Jan. 9, 2006): link

Lawprof Blogging: Scholarship or Distraction?, Orin Kerr (Jan. 8, 2006): link

Boynton on Academic Blogging, Orin Kerr (Nov. 16, 2005): link

Drezner’s Denial and Academic Blogging, Juan Non-Volokh (pseud.) (Oct. 9, 2005): link

Why Blogs Will Not Replace Law Reviews, Orin Kerr (July 6, 2005): link

Query on Blogs and Legal Scholarship, Orin Kerr (July 5, 2005): link

Blogging and Blog-Reading – Why and Why Not?, Eugene Volokh (Apr. 8, 2005): link

The Future of Legal Scholarship?, Orin Kerr (Feb. 10, 2005): link

Are Blogs and SSRN Changing Legal Scholarship?, Orin Kerr (June 4, 2003): link