Law X.0

Launch of Law Talk Podcast Features Steven D. Smith on the State of Legal Philosophy

Nate Oman's inaugural episode of "Law Talk: The Legal Scholarship Podcast" features San Diego law prof Steven D. Smith. Smith's book Law's Quandary as well as his recently published lecture, "The (Always) Immanent Death of Law." is the topic of the podcast.  Oman writes, "along the way, Steve has some fascinating things to say about law, the state of legal philosophy, and what jurisprudence might (or might not) have to say to the 'real' practice of law."

See also Smith's Jurisprudence: Beyond Extinction? Here's the abstract from SSRN:

Of the various subjects of legal study, jurisprudence is the one in which the most momentous and profound questions about law are addressed, or in which, as Holmes put it, we might hope to “connect . . . with the universe and catch an echo of the infinite.” Or so we might suppose . . . but it seems we would be wrong. In recent years, at least, the questions addressed under the headings of “jurisprudence” or “philosophy of law” hold little interest for any but the purest (i.e., the most incorrigibly academic) of theorists. It is hard to resist the impression that the questions are merely semantic, and that some of the most powerful minds in the profession are amusing themselves with word play.

How to account for this peculiar state of affairs? Is jurisprudence a dinosaur that has outlived its time? This essay, written for a general-audience symposium collecting short interpretations of the state of jurisprudence today, reflects on those questions, and suggests that classic jurisprudential claims and questions have been translated into a secular vocabulary and framework that deprive them of their meaning and significance.

[JH]

Is the Future of Legal Scholarship in the Blogosphere?

Margaret Schilt, Faculty Services Librarian, University of Chicago Law School Library, writes "if you are looking for the future of legal scholarship, chances are that you may find it not in a treatise or the traditional law review but in a different form, profoundly influenced by the blogosphere." Read the  Legal Times article for more. [JH]

Circuits split on Web download as interstate commerce

From the National Law Journal: "In a case involving the possession of child pornography, the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals broke with two other circuits, the 3rd and 5th, and ruled against the government's assertion that the interstate character of the Internet means a connection to a Web site server invariably involves data moving in interstate commerce."  (sub. req.)  [RJ

Visualize Your Blog's Connectivity with TouchGraph

You can create a map of your blog's network of connectivity with TouchGraph. I've created the below maps for Law Blog Metrics, Law Librarian Blog, and the blogs of the Law Professor Blogs Network hosted on our Network's master TypePad domain using the TouchGraph Google Browser (click on the image for a larger display).

Law Blog Metrics

Law Librarian Blog

Law Professor Blogs Network

To really appreciate the power of this tool, the images of the above maps do not do it justice because the actual visualizations are interactive. The TouchGraph Google Browser relies on Google's database of related sites for data. All you need is a URL and the latest version of Java installed on your computer. [JH]

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.