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Law professors’ blogs draw huge audience

September 24, 2005

UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh’s The Volokh Conspiracy and University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds’ Instapundit blogs are featured in an excellent article in the UCLA Daily Bruin. Most bloggers have heard of the two blogs but this article is a nice read to see their success and what draws readers to their blogs.

On Volokh:

Now, with 13 other posters, all legal experts, and an audience of more than 10,000 readers daily, its mission is relatively unchanged, but has grown into an online publication that posters and readers alike say often offers a far better look at legal issues – such as the recent battle over the U.S. Supreme Court vacancies – than any newspaper can provide.

His words of wisdom:

I don’t have to worry about a news hook … I don’t have to write within this artificial 700-word format … I can just put out the stuff I want to put out.

From one lawyer and contributor to the blog on the value of legal blogs to mass media:

A lot of these reporters [journalists] don’t have that much knowledge of the law. … They don’t understand the basic way many of the courts function. It’s helpful to have both the practitioner’s perspective and the law professor’s perspective in The Volokh Conspiracy.

Understand more than one lawyer client of LexBlog has told me they’re not a professor so are not going to keep up with guys like Volokh and Reynolds.