That was the subject of a recent symposium at Denver University’s law school. The DU Law Review’s online publication, DUProcess, published several short articles on the topic. I wrote on Connecting Laypeople with the Law Through Blogs, and began: “Blogging is creating a Golden Age of legal scholarship. For the first time in the memory of any living person, legal scholarship is now connecting with an audience beyond the world of law professors and legal professionals.” I argued that law blogging provides readers with much better coverage of important appellate cases than does the MSM, and as an example pointed to Dale Carpenter’s VC posts on gay marriage cases. I also suggested that comment threads on legal blogs provide people with an opportunity that, in the olden days, mostly belonged only to on-campus law students: having a serious, enjoyable pro/con discussion of legal issues. Checking on Westlaw, I found that of the 291 law review citations to the Volokh Conspiracy, five were to comments. Lastly, I suggest that law blogging continues a salutrary trend which began nearly four centuries ago:
Starting around 1250, courts in England began operating in French. After hundreds of years, the legal language had turned into something called “law French,” which was a confusing amalgam of English and of a French that no French person would ever speak. The new American colonists jettisoned law French. In America, the law was stated positively in statutes written in straightforward English comprehensible to ordinary people.
The writing of statutes in plain English was one of the methods by which the Americans ensured that the law was under the control of the people, rather than imposed from above. One of the causes for the cynicism which many modern Americans feel about government in general, and law in particular, is the degree to which the laws Americans must obey have become as incomprehensible to a normal, literate American as law French was to a normal, literate Englishman.
Scholarly legal blogging is a wholesome, constructive development, in the tradition of the plain English statutory writing of our American ancestors four hundred years ago. By making law, and legal scholarship, more accessible to the lay public, law bloggers are reconnecting American law with the American people.
In the same symposium, Sam Kamin writes briefly on how professors use law blogging to enhance their traditional writing. Alan Chen discusses the use of blogs in faculty hiring or promotion. Student Joe Aguilar explains Race to the Bottom, DU’s joint faculty-student blog on corporate governance.
If you’re interested in the role of blogs in legal education, you might also enjoy Of Empires, Independents, and Captives: Law Blogging, Law Scholarship, and Law School Rankings by J. Robert Brown, Jr., and David I. C. Thomson’s book Law School 2.0: Legal Education for a Digital Age. Thomson argues that the new electronic media can–and should–lead to more profound changes in legal education than anything that has occurred in the last hundred years. If you want to check out some of the book’s ideas before buying, a 2008 paper by Thomson sets up the issue, and another paper details how legal writing can be taught well in an online-only class.
3L says:
In addition to the information provided in the article — and though it might not align with the political views of the majority of the commenters here — the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review just published its online component (Amicus) with an article on the same issue by Professor John Palfrey. It’s worth giving a look.
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October 27, 2009, 3:35 pmdearieme says:
“In America, the law was stated positively in statutes written in straightforward English comprehensible to ordinary people.”
Are you suggesting that English statutes at that time were all written in Law French? I must say, the English Bill of Rights, for example, looks to me to be written in comprehensible English, as American politicians presumably agreed. Else why did they crib so much of it for their own Bill of Rights a century later?
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October 27, 2009, 3:48 pmMonte Meals says:
“The writing of statutes in plain English was one of the methods by which the Americans ensured that the law was under the control of the people ...”
Well said! The US Constitution is four (4) pages long — add in the Bill of Rights and it is still under 20 pages — and all of it readable!
Flash forward to today — the current (one of an interminable list of) health care bill is over 1,500 pages of (pardon my french) legal gibberish.
It is as if our Congress Persons really don’t want us to know what is in the bill and are trying to wear us down with fatigue.
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October 27, 2009, 3:52 pmJosh Blackman says:
How was your experience working with an Online Supplement to a journal? I have an article forthcoming about McDonald and Privileges or Immunities that will likely hit the stands in January, but I would like to possibly get a shortened version online sooner. In your West Law searches, did you see how many articles cite to online supplements of law reviews? http://bit.ly/3DjzDy
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October 27, 2009, 4:01 pmDave N says:
That’s why I come here on a daily basis.
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October 27, 2009, 5:00 pmThe Volokh Conspiracy » Blog Archive » Legal Scholarship in the … « 7 Journals says:
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ShelbyC says:
1250 they began operating in French? I would have guessed almost 200 years before that. What did they operate in before that, Latin? My understanding is that there is very little written English between the Doomsday book and the 1300’s.
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October 27, 2009, 6:21 pmiolanthe says:
Same thought occurred to me as Dearieme. Any suggestion that the Americans were writing in english while the English were using incomprehensible french dialects is, to use an appropriately english expression, bollocks.
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October 28, 2009, 4:24 amResveratrol says:
Okay, so I am going to presume you have checked on Wiki for lobby groups and royal commission.
I presume a political demonstration is fairly self-explanatory!
I also hope you are doing something with law because the best thing I can find for legal scholarship is in a very complicated article below.
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October 28, 2009, 7:45 amDavid McCourt says:
Latin was the language of English law before the mid-13th century.
“The new American colonists jettisoned law French.” Law French had largely disappeared in England before the end of the 17th century. The American colonists made use of Blackstone, which was written in English. All English statutes had been written in English since the late 15th century. Might as well say the colonists jettisoned serfdom.
This may be the “Golden Age of legal scholarship,” but it seems lawyers are still lousy historians.
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October 28, 2009, 11:08 am21st Century Legal Scholarship « Advocate’s Studio says:
[...] readers an interesting article from David Kopel over at the Volokh Conspiracy on the issue of Legal Scholarship in the Digital Age. Kopel opines that legal blogging is creating a “Golden Age” in legal scholarship, [...]