Law X.0

Victim Uses Facebook to ID Suspect

CNN is reporting that police arrested a suspect in an alleged hate-crime attack on the Georgetown University campus thanks to the victim who searched through Facebook profiles to identify his attacker. [JH]

Blogging, Scholarship and the Bench and Bar at Santa Clara

On September 11th, the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) and the National Law Journal presented a panel discussion on "Blogging, Scholarship, and the Bench and Bar" at Santa Clara University School of Law. The panelists included Eric Goldman, Santa Clara law prof and blogger at the Technology & Marketing Law Blog, who blogged the notes he prepared for the event on Goldman's Observations and Illinois law prof and Legal Theory blogger Larry Solum who posted a brief recap of the event. Goldman's notes are particularly interesting. His reflections focus on the following questions:

• "How much time should a professor spend on blogging? When is it too much?"
• "How can someone tell the difference between a good blog and a bad blog? How can the reader know if what's on a blog is accurate and truthful?"
• "What suggestions do you have regarding the format of law review articles that are drawn from your blogging experience?"
• "Law school gossip -- who has an offer from what law school, for example -- travels quickly on blogs. Has this been a positive or negative development on balance?"

Hat tip to Adjunct Law Prof Blog. [JH]

Reader, Not Editor-centric, Ethical Standards

John Dvorak, PC Magazine's man with a million opinions, writes about how mainstream ethical journalism is crumbling under the massive weight of a reporting blogosphere.

The holier-than-thou old media thinking will fall by the wayside. In new media publications, ethics are demanded by the readers, not the editors. With open forums, comment threads, and other mechanisms, the modern structure is policed by the public. Old media cannot grasp this concept.

I mention this ethics issue only because new media in general is unethical—if we are to judge it by old standards.

Emphasis added.

Read more about this in Dvorak's The Road from Media Ethics to Information Anarchy. [JH]

Meredith Farkas Releases Results of Her 2007 Survey of the Biblioblogosphere

Meredith Farkas has started publishing results from her survey. I recommend reading Interesting Facts from the Survey of the Biblioblogosphere 2007 and checking her Index of Results for links to her reports which will be published in four parts: Demographics, Blog Demographics, Attitudes and Behaviors, and Results from Various Filters.  [JH]

Legal Career Blog

Edited by Mississippi law prof Greg Bowman, Legal Career Blog addresses law school issues, careers in law and alternative career options for lawyers.

Hat tip to Adjunct Law Prof Blog. [JH]

Law Prof Gives Lecture in Second Life Today

Joshua Fairfield, visiting professor of law at Washington and Lee University, will deliver a lecture titled "Anti-Social Contracts in Virtual Worlds" today. The lecture will take place at 11:00 am pacific time. Fairfield's talk, which is part of the Metanomics Series sponsored by Cornell University's Johnson School of Management, will focus on the uses and limits of contracts in governing interactions in virtual worlds. For links and details, read the press release. [JH]