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Legal blogs cited by judiciary should have own domain name

Legal blogs that will be cited by the judiciary need to have their own domain.

Law professors and other leading legal authorities blogging on platforms such as Blogger or TypePad which do not have their own domain raise a real challenge. Their blog will be cited in a decision and years later when people click on the digital link, the domain will have changed and users will not be able to reach the piece cited.

I differ with Ian Best who was quoted in this week’s National Law Journal article that the answer to legal blogs being cited in legal opinions more often is to have some hard copy that can be collected and be official. First the world, including the courts, is going digital. Second, having an official record of legal blogs is by definition going to have official screeners of those blogs to be allowed. Blogging is democratic in nature, open to all.

  • http://www.robhyndman.com Rob Hyndman
  • http://www.specialistlegalservices.com.au/ Specialist Legal Services

    I concur with Kevin… using generic blogging services is fraught with danger for future citations. While the webcitation.org project might be an interesting ‘patch’ to fix this problem, using very generic URLs has its own share of problems.
    Serious commentators really need to be blogging from their own domains and using meaningful URLs (such as the intelligent permalink structure used on this site). It helps preserve history and certainly enhances branding too.