Legal Commentary

These results suggest that blogging has become a more widespread and accepted practice in the legal academy. It's important to remember that people cite for many different reasons: to give credit for ideas, to criticize ideas, and as (persuasive) authority. My guess is that most of these citations fall into the first two categories, but that is true to many citations for law review articles as well.

I'm hoping that some enterprising scholar will do a study of citation practices to a selection of 20 or so well known legal blogs to see if the citation patterns for these two blogs reflect a general trend. (Perhaps it's already been done-- please let me know in the comments.)

If so, it suggests that something very interesting is happening in legal scholarship. The legal academy is gradually becoming acclimated to blogs as vehicles of scholarship and scholarly quality. But perhaps even more important: Blogs are not displacing standard form legal scholarship; rather they are being assimilated into the larger universe of legal writing and becoming part of the web of citations and authorities along with cases, treatises, law review articles, and casebooks.

This difference between displacement and assimilation is quite important for a number of reasons. When people cite to blogs, they are simultaneously inserting blog posts into a pre-existing economy of accreditation and salience. Put more simply, they are using the tools law professors already use to decide what's relevant and important to legal scholarship in order to decide which blog posts are relevant and important. Blogging has its own methods of accreditation and salience: linking practices are the most obvious example. But my point is that the old forms of accreditation and salience are not simply being shoved aside: rather they are also reaching out to include some parts (but, importantly, not other parts) of the blogosphere. We can see traditional legal scholarship thus evaluating and coopting new media, just as we can see new media entering into and challenging existing forms of legal scholarship.

In hindsight, of course, all of this makes perfect sense. People and institutions are already deeply invested in existing forms of publication and accreditation. Careers and reputations have been built and maintained based on the old tools and the old forms. Therefore there will be no dramatic revolution in the ways that law professors write and how they judge and accredit quality. Rather, what we will see is the use of old tools for new purposes extended to new forms of writing, and the gradual assimilation and coopation of new forms and tools to older purposes. A revolution in legal writing and legal scholarship is coming, driven by changes in technology, but it will be far more gradual than some people expected (or feared), and it will look quite different than people initially imagined.

Full post as published by Balkinization on January 31, 2008 (boomark / email).