Lawprof Blogging: Scholarship or Distraction?:
Paul Caron has a post summarizing the panel discussion on lawpof blogging at the AALS conference this past week. The panelists were Victor Fleischer, Larry Solum, Dennis Patterson, and our own Randy Barnett. I missed the panel, unfortunately, but based on Paul's summary it was a very interesting event.
UPDATE: Dan Markel offers additional thoughts here, and Dan Solove adds his 2 cents here. And don't miss Christine Hurt's take on gender and blogging here.
UPDATE: Dan Markel offers additional thoughts here, and Dan Solove adds his 2 cents here. And don't miss Christine Hurt's take on gender and blogging here.
Related Posts (on one page):
- Blogging and Scholarship:
- Lawprof Blogging: Scholarship or Distraction?:
Why not both?
But it's not scholarship (or teaching).
Teaching used to be placed in the universities because that is where the libraries and knowledge once were.
No longer.
If universities cannot become an open forum ... and a source of true professional learning and credentialing rather than a place of privelige ... they will not survive.
Evidence based examinations will take over.
Better peer review and permanence for L.Rev. Wider audience for blog but with perils of rush to judgment, being spun (used), and caught up in celebrity.
As we are talking about law school and professors, a slight detour for some advice. My son is graduating cum laude with a 5 year degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Missouri and is applying to law schools, he wants to stay in the northern midwest, for some reason, he likes cold weather. He wants to specialize in intellectual property law, he figures it will tie in well with his engineering degree. He is looking at three state schools, Missouri, Wisconsin and Michigan State and four private ones, DePaul, Marquette, Saint Louis and Drake. His LSAT score was 161. I was wondering if there were any other schools you might recommend with strong departments in intellectual property law.
If anyone else has any advice, it would be appreciated.
I don't know; I don't work in IP, so I wouldn't want to guess. Also, I think the common wisdom is that the best approach usually is to focus more on the best school overall and less on specific strength in an individual area. You never know if your son will stay interested in IP; he may take a course in it and find he likes something else instead. But of course every case is different.
I say this as a UVA law grad from '81 who has never taught in any law school.
Likewise, given the informality, there is no reason why informal somments can't be posted, i.e mocking the losing teams in the play-offs; damn I miss being in the States for the Super Bowl.
The last several posts have been nothing but good old boy orchestrating as the Titanic sinks.
I can cite Ivy League credentials with the rest of you, but what you are saying is just posturing with the hope that the imaginary world you are living in will keep on keeping on.
Still, blogging does strike me as outreach. But outreach is rarely rewarded at research universities, unless required by a grant. And even then, one gets promotion/tenure consideration for the *grants*, and not for the outreach that the benefactors required: My dean of faculty would be perfectly happy if our institute's grant did not require faculty to spend time developing Asian Studies curricula for a local high school.
I am not a lawyer, and so I run the risk of being "flamed" on this one. But the comments about the difference between law review articles and blogs strikes me as a bit overstated. Law reviews are not, generally, peer-reviewed journals, are they? A friend of mine has written a couple articles for good law reviews, and gets nothing on his tenure-promotion sheet for having done so. He, like me, teaches in the Arts and Letters college, which credits us only for peer-reviewed articles. Law review articles go under the c.v. heading of non-scholarly publications, in the company of, say, my irregular column on foreign policy for a newpaper.