Law X.0

A List of Legislative Blogs

This is a bit off the subject of legal blogs, but I am posting a list of legislative blogs here. I expect that one of the difficulties in my taxonomy project will be differentiating between legal blogs and political ones (which will be removed), since there is so much overlap between the two categories. But I will not be including blogs by legislators in my final taxonomy. However, this list may still be useful and informative to some readers. It includes blogs by individual legislators, and by state legislatures.

New Census of Law Professor Bloggers

Prof. Daniel Solove, of Concurring Opinions, has posted a new Law Professor Blogger Census. This is the most current and thorough list of law professor bloggers online. According to this update, the list includes 235 law professor bloggers.

Prof. Solove breaks the bloggers down into schools,and compiles some useful statistics about blog growth, blog additions and subtractions, and the gender of professor bloggers.

I used a previous version of Prof. Solove’s census for this post on a Futuristic Summer Job, which led to responses from several law professors here.

A Wiki Collection of Fortune 500 Blogs

Without intending to, I have become a reference for blog lists outside of my own taxonomy, such as international legal blogs, law library blogs, and law student blogs.  I’m happy to direct people to these worthwhile collections.

I discovered another list: a collection of blogs by Fortune 500 Companies. I’m including this list because anyone interested in business and corporate law might like to know about it. My own prediction is that virtually every field of law will be affected by blogs. That is, lawyers in almost every specialty will eventually confront a client who blogs, or a relevant case involving blogs.

Law students who plan to go into corporate law, for example, will need to learn the legal aspects of corporate blogging. What are companies allowed to say on their blogs? What are the legal risks of blogging? What if a customer relies on a company’s blog, and the information is inaccurate? What if an employee writes something offensive or defamatory on the blog? If one company’s blog quotes from a competitor’s blog, when does that become a copyright violation? There are multitudes of questions that have not yet been fully explored, but as more companies and corporations blog, lawyers will have to consider the answers and advise their clients accordingly. 

More on the list of Fortune 500 blogs can be found at this explanation by Chris Anderson, one of the creators of the list. Here is an excerpt:

Earlier this year I was at a dinner with Doc Searls and we got to talking about why some companies blog and some don't. Microsoft blogs, and Apple doesn't. Sun blogs and Intel doesn't. GM blogs and Toyota doesn't. And so on.

Perhaps, Doc wondered, the risks and uncertainties of public business blogging are so great that big companies only do it under duress, when their traditional corporate messaging has lost traction. So companies on the way up don't want to mess with their success by introducing a new lens on the enterprise that isn't controlled by the PR department. But companies on the way down are willing to try anything to regain the confidence of their customers. [Update: Doc has posted more background on this here.]

 

Hmm, I thought. That's testable. Let's look at which of the Fortune 500 companies are blogging and compare their past twelve month share performance with those that aren't. If this theory stands up, the blogging members of the F500 will have underperformed the nonblogging members. And then we can also see if blogging makes a difference going forward, by continuing to follow the two cohorts.

Complete List of Law Library Blogs

Joe Hodnicki, the chief technologist of Law Professor Blogs and editor of the Law Librarian Blog, has informed me of a complete list of blogs by law libraries and law librarians. The list was compiled by Bonnie Shucha, of the University of Wisconsin Law Library. This is a thorough and excellent resource.

A Global Directory of Legal Blogs

Prof. Manuel David Masseno, who teaches law at Beja Polytechnic in Portugal, has informed me of a truly amazing resource. In his own words, it is “a worldwide and multilingual, critical and systematized, directory of Blawgs.” The directory is called ObsBlogJur, which stands for “Observatory of the Legal Blogosphere.”  According to Prof. Masseno, ObsBlogJur was “built as our contribution to the European LEFIS - Legal Framework for the Information Society,” which is a European academic network.

I am grateful to Prof. Masseno for letting me know about this global directory, and for placing 3L Epiphany on its list of “Repertories and Recentions.” Readers who are interested in legal blogs around the world should spend time exploring this remarkable database.

A List of Law Student Blogs

I am pleased to announce that Kurt Hunt, a University of Michigan law student who blogs at Clever WoT, is compiling a list of law student blogs. He has collected 175 so far. Please let him know about any blogs that are missing from his list.

Best of luck to Kurt in carrying out this project.