Balkinization  

Friday, September 08, 2006

Yale Pocket Part Symposium on Online Legal Scholarship

JB

Yale Law Journal's Pocket Part has published an online symposium on how online legal media will change legal scholarship. The contributors currently include Ann Althouse, Christopher Bracey, Paul Caron, Stephen Vladeck, and Eugene Volokh, and the symposium will eventually add essays from Rosa Brooks and Brian Leiter. The essays are all quite interesting and I recommend them to you.

My own contribution is called Online Legal Scholarship: The Medium and the The Message. It talks about how online media change the subject matter, audience, style, tempo, and expectations of legal scholars, and how they may also change our assessments of scholarly vocation and scholarly merit.

The Yale Law Journal editors, perhaps too optimistically, noted that my essay begins with an account of how this blog "helped scuttle Senator Arlen Specter’s recent bill on domestic spying." In fact, Marty's and my work on Balkinization did no such thing. The Specter bill is still alive and well, and the Administration is still pushing for it. What we did was to expose some of its more egregious features, help the mass media understand the legal problems with the bill, and help get the message out both to specialized policy audiences and to a wider public. That is only one of the many services that academic blogging can perform.


Comments:

Post a Comment

Older Posts
Newer Posts
Home