A Case Study in Bloggership

Wisconsin law prof D. Gordon Smith's A Case Study in Bloggership is about to be published in the Washington University Law Review. 

Abstract: This brief essay, prepared for a symposium on Bloggership: How Blogs Are Transforming Legal Scholarship, held at Harvard Law School on April 27-28, 2006, uses blogging about The Walt Disney Company Derivative Litigation at the Conglomerate blog to illustrate the potential of blogging as a scholarly medium. Blogging encourages individual research and reflection, and its public nature provides an opportunity for scholarly activity that is similar in many ways to presenting at an academic conference or publishing an editorial article. Bloggership is a useful neologism that distinguishes this sort of scholarship from traditional, long-form scholarship and it distinguishes blogging that has scholarly aspirations from other forms of blogging. If scholarship is about making a contribution to knowledge, and the receptacle for that contribution is a scholarly community, then blogs seem well positioned to serve as delivery mechanisms.

Here's the SSRN version (revised March 27, 2007). [JH]