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Legal Commentary

: Balkinization

A Little More on the Citation of Blogs in Legal Scholarship

By Jack M. Balkin

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Over at Law Librarian Blog, Joe Hodnicki has some statistical evidence about the assimilation of blogs into legal literature, as I discussed previously:

According to this estimate, blog citations in law reviews and court opinions have grown from about 70 in 2004 to over 500 in 2007 (and still counting since many law reviews have not completed their 2007 publishing cycle). I believe it is fair to say that for 2005 and 2006 blog citations probably grew exponentially on a document count basis, doubling every year.

Hodnicki speculates that the rates of increased citations will level off fairly soon, reflecting a maturation of the system.

Meanwhile, Matt Berns, a 2L at Georgetown, writes that we can't understand this phenomenon without taking into account law students, who are from a younger generation and more accepting of blogs as sources of information:

[Your] post was interesting but I think it missed an important point regarding causation: it's not only law professors (authors) who can increase citation numbers but also law students (read, law journal editors). If authors are becoming more familiar and comfortable with the blogosphere, the editors are either doing so at a faster pace or are already there. The increase in citation numbers for blogs might be contrasted with citations to wikipedia (not many, but perhaps growing in number), which authors commonly include in their articles only to be told by journals (mine at least) that an alternative citation is necessary.

My guess is that blog citations will continue to increase over the next several years, but the full assimilation of blogs into legal scholarship will require a generational shift, as law students who grew up with blogs and may be more aware of their comparative strengths and weaknesses enter the legal profession and the legal academy.

Finally, there is this curmudgeonly analysis from my friend Brian Leiter, who, generally speaking, sees little good in blogs and doubts that anyone should take them seriously in scholarship. As he explains, if the number of law review citations to blogs is going up

Legal scholarship is really doomed if that is true! Alternatively, it reveals something very unflattering about what counts as legal "scholarship." In any case, this reminds me of an article by someone about "Why Blogs Are Bad for Legal Scholarship." Which I think is still true, even more so, if Balkin is right. (And notwithstanding my own very modest experiment with slightly more scholarly blogging, which really operates more like a listserve for like-minded scholars.)
Of course, blogs are the perfect medium for circulating information about the academic profession, and news and views about matters of little intellectual substance!

I should note that Brian also runs two blogs with very serious academic discussions, one on jurisprudence and one on Nietzsche, somewhat undermining his own suggestion that the medium is pretty much good for nothing. This creates something like a blogger's version of the Liar paradox: "'Everything you read on blogs is worthless,' said Brian on his own blog."

Full post as published by Balkinization on February 05, 2008 (boomark / email).