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The Legal Blogosphere and The Diffusion of Legal Expertise

By Jack M. Balkin

Paul Caron did a study of law blog traffic rankings for the last year. Brian Leiter, who lands in the top fifteen twice for his two blogs, notes:

Curious that four of the top five have almost nothing to do with law; four of the top five are right-wing blogs; and three of the top five have almost no intellectual content. Welcome to the blogosphere!

I think, in fact, that this is pretty much what we should expect. Blogs directed at popular audiences generally get the largest traffic. Specialty blogs, including blogs that specialize in delivering legal expertise, are usually niches, generating relatively low traffic that is nevertheless useful to the communities that read them.

We have to keep in mind that the "legal blogosphere" is not one thing. It is actually a combination of different types of sites, offering political punditry, gossip, clipping services of newsworthy legal events, clipping services of events of academic interest, and scholarly commentary. If you categorized sites in this fashion, and then asked which genres were likely to generate the highest traffic, your guess would probably not be far off from the results that Caron found.

Instead of seeing the glass half empty, you should see it half full. Forget for the moment about those sites that draw readers primarily through political punditry, cultural commentary and/or gossip. Confine your attention solely to the sites that make it their business to deliver serious academic content, week after week. Call this segment the academic legal blogosphere proper.

These sites are engaged in something very important: the diffusion of professional expertise. It is a diffusion that would not have been possible on this scale before the age of the Internet and remember, we are still in the earliest stages of this development. These legal blogs simultaneously (1) allow academic communities of interest to form; (2) forge connections with lawyers and judges in practice who pay hardly any attention to law review scholarship anymore; (3) put informed legal analysis into the hands of journalists and political writers who can now find it more easily than they ever could before; and (4) offer lay persons a window in to what legal experts think.

Here is the point: Even the least trafficked of these expert blogs probably gain more readers in six months than most law professors could hope for in a career.

To me, at least, it is encouraging that our friends at the Volokh Conspiracy have managed to get and keep as many readers as they do while still maintaining a high standard of academic discussion. They do this in part by crossing genres far more than most of the other academic blogs: They mix legal analysis with punditry, cultural commentary, leavened with occaisional jokes, puzzles and games. The medium allows you to do this. They have, over the years, created a pretty good mix that brings their readers back but doesn't insult their intelligence either.

I think that the future of the academic legal blogosphere-- by which I mean that subset that devotes itself primarily to serious academic commentary-- is very bright. It will never get the same readership as blogs that specialize in punditry, but it is doing something that most law professors have always dreamed of-- bringing ideas that they believe are interesting and important to a far larger audience, reaching people outside the legal academy who want to know what law professors actually think about the law. Surely this is a worthy endeavor, whose success we legal academics should all be proud of.

Full post as published by Balkinization on February 19, 2008 (boomark / email).