International Law

Lawyers, blogs and money

James Grimmelmann considers whether legal academics should commercialise their blogs:

Drafting my disclosure statement reminded me of an issue I?ve been meaning to discuss for a while. I don?t blog for money; I?m uncomfortable when other legal academics do. For the most part, we don?t need the money to operate our blogs, so bringing money into the picture creates some unnecessary tensions.

This is not a condemnation of commercialized blogging. When a corporate executive writes for a company blog, the self-interest is both obvious and irrelevant. Full-time bloggers, like full-time journalists, need to get paid or they don?t eat. And plenty of hobbyist bloggers would have a hard time if their blogs weren?t self-funding. My concerns are more specific to legal academic blogging. Professors have a special calling. We?re paid to be intellectually independent.

Nor am I saying that law professors should never mix the blogging arts with commerce. There?s no firm line between blogging and other activities in the public eye. Just as it?s okay to for professors to be paid to write op-eds, best-selling books, and newspaper columns, it?s okay for them to be paid to blog. Glenn Reynolds blogged for four years for MSNBC; it was a great gig for a law professor and good for the academy that he took it.

My point is only that adding money to a blog introduces a set of subtle interlocking pressures: maximize readership, drive readers to ads, measure everything. The steps some legal bloggers take to satisfy these pressures can undercut the free flow of ideas at the heart of the scholarly ideal.

Finally, some blogs are so popular that their hosting costs are beyond what any one academic should be expected to pay out of hobby money. These blogs need sponsors just to exist. (Perhaps law schools could treat them as faculty promotion expenses?but that would raise a different set of independence concerns.) These blogs have no choice but to wrestle with the issues I?ll describe below. The rest of us, though?and that?s the overwhelming majority of lawprof bloggers?have moderate readerships and few expenses. We can avoid the tensions altogether, and I think usually should.

Let me explain.

Read more here (from The Laboratorium).

Full post as published by Freedom to Differ on January 18, 2008 (boomark / email).