Which Law Blogs Do Academic Visitors Read?

Check out Denver law prof and Race to the Bottom blogger J. Robert Brown's very interesting post! The study is based on a August 24, 2007 snapshot of law blog readership and includes a list of the most popular law professor blogs by academic visitors (those with an .edu domain) on that day. Brown provides his data at Comparison of Blog Rankings Based Upon All Visitors and Academic Visitors, August 24, 2007 (a practice I hope others would follow). The data was compiled using Justia's proprietary system for ranking blogs. See related post,  BlawgSearch Top Law Professor Blogs by edu visitors and Top Blawgs for August 2007.

See also Brown's Blogs, Law School Rankings, and TheRacetotheBottom.org article which is available on SSRN. Here's the abstract:

Blogs are changing legal scholarship. Although not a substitute for the detailed, often intricately researched analysis contained in law reviews and other scholarly publications, they fill an important gap in the scholarly continuum. Blog posts can generate ideas and discussion that can be transformed into more a systematic and thorough paper or scholarly article. At the same time, blogs provide a forum for testing ideas once they are published in more traditional venues.

While over time, a blog presence will likely become de rigueur for top scholars and law reviews, top tier schools as a group have not yet targeted blogs as a necessary component of scholarly activity. In the short term, therefore, blogs provide unique opportunities for faculty and law schools outside the top tier to enhance their reputational rankings. Blogs can enhance reputation by allowing faculty to route around some of the biases in law review placements and SSRN rankings that favor those at the top tier schools. Blogs also represent a cost effective mechanism for advertising scholarly activity.

The paper discusses the evidence that blogs enhance reputation and surveys the way that scholars at law schools outside the top tier are already harnessing blogs to enhance their reputations. The paper also discusses what it takes to create a successful blog, from the search for content to the benefits of advertising. The paper finishes with a brief history of The Race to the Bottom, a corporate governance blog.