Real Lawyers Have Blogs : Law Blogs, Social Media, Twitter

Gosh, I would hope not but that's the jist of a couple posts I just read.

Carolyn Elefant picked up on University of Texas Law Professor Brian Leiter's post that blogs may hinder a law professor's professional prospects. Leiter writes:

Because blogs are easily accessible and thus easier to read in a spare moment than, say, a scholarly article or scholarly book, blogs that purport to treat scholarly topics are far more likely to solidify an impression of a professor's mind and overwhelm the merits of his or her actual publications (assuming the two have different merits).  This is why, it seems to me, it is particularly risky for either students or junior faculty to blog much:  the first, and perhaps dominant, impression of this person's work is likely to be defined by the blog, whether fairly or not.  If you're going to blog on scholarly topics, it had better be good!

Shocking as it sounded that we should insulate law professors and practicing lawyers from each further, I read more of Leiter's post to find that Law Professors were telling other scholars to go slow on blogs. Daniel Drezner, an associate professor of law at Tufts University and blogger himself, had some alarming things to say about blogs.

When I was an assistant professor at the University of Chicago, a senior colleague once told me his secret to academic success: One bad article equals five great ones. His point was that the worst thing a scholar can do is to publish too much, as opposed to too little. Any substandard publication creates a black mark that is difficult to erase......

Blogs and prestigious university appointments do not mix terribly well. That is because top departments are profoundly risk-averse when it comes to senior hires. In some ways, that caution is sensible — hiring a senior professor is the equivalent of signing a baseball player to a lifetime contract without any ability to release or trade him. In such a situation, even small doubts about an individual become magnified.

The trouble with blogs is that they seem designed to provoke easy doubts. Blogs are an outlet for unexpurgated, unreviewed, and occasionally unprofessional musings. What makes them worth reading can also make them prone to error. Any honest scholar-blogger — myself included — could acknowledge a post or two that they would like to have back. At a place like Yale, one bad blog post can erase a lot of good will very quickly.

.....Today's senior faculty members look at blogs the way a previous generation of academics looked at television — as a guilty, tawdry pleasure that should not be talked about in respectable circles. (Leitner pointed out that fellow professors did read his blog though).....

But Leiter's conclusion, where he first says in a perfect world law blogs would be ignored in the hiring process, gives me hope.

...[P]erhaps university committees should consciously factor in the positives — quality blogs allow scholars to link grand theory to real-world events, cultivate new ideas, and spark public debates — that come from scholar blogging.

Based on the panel discussion at Stanford Law School last week, we're closer to law faculty looking at the positives than Leiter thinks. Santa Clara Law Professor Eric Goldman and University of Illinois Law Professor Lawrence Solum found tremndous reputation enhancement through publishing a law blog. Solum found the benefits of publishing a blog far outweighed the benefits of publishing law review articles. There was little doubt in Solum's mind that law blogs were disintermeditating law reviews.

In addition to reputation enhancement for law professors, blogs open up the lines of communication between the practicing bar and academia in a way never before possible. Wisconsin lawyer Anne Reed, cited by Elefant, posts:

...[A]s far as I can tell [...] blogging has changed the way lawyers and professors talk to each other. Practitioners hear from professors daily, not when the quarterly review comes out. Professors hear from practitioners, instead of just each other. And whenever either side posts, the other side chimes in with comments. It's a discussion.

So much to be gained by law professors blogging. Let's hope the small minded folks don't prevail on this one.

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