Law professor blogs : 182 and growing, up 40% in 5 months

Law professor blogs are growing at a fast clip per an article today in the National Law Journal.

An increasing number of law professors are using blogs-online journals or newsletters-to break free from traditional modes of legal scholarship. With an immediacy and ability to reach millions of readers, blogs are proving an attractive vehicle among legal scholars for spouting and sharing ideas……Some 182 law professors have blogs, according to a count taken in November by Daniel Solove, a law professor and blogger at George Washington University. That number represented a 40% increase from Solove’s previous count, taken five months earlier. Of those bloggers, 41 are female and 141 are male. The schools with the most bloggers are University of Chicago Law School, University of California at Los Angeles School of Law, University of San Diego School of Law and George Washington University.

Among the top 20 schools, as ranked by U.S. News & World Report, there are 59 bloggers. Some of the more recent blogs include BlackProf, The Saddam Hussein Trial Blog, ImmigrationProf and Supreme Court Extra, according to Solove’s site.

Why the high percentage of law professor blogs from top law schools? Professor Stephen Bainbridge, a corporate law professor at UCLA and my source for this post, had this to say:

Does that credential give the potential blogger a leg up? Or is it just that the kind of people who land jobs at top 20 schools are also the kind who would find blogging attractive? I don’t know, but if I had to guess, I’d say it’s both.

And you gotta enjoy Steve Bainbridge’s reply to the quote from Katherine Litvak, a professor at the University of Texas School of Law, that “[Blogs have nothing to do with scholarship.”

Yeah, whatever. In fact, as Rick Garnett observes, law prof blogging resembles “enthusiastic and engaged conversations around the lunch table, or during a workship? — anything at all to contribute to the scholarly enterprise.”

This is a great article on law professor blogs by Leigh Jones and not to be missed. It’s the stuff that gets the juices going if you’re one, like me, who believes the Internet was built for discussion and the exchange of information. It does not take a rocket scientist to see the future is much more aligned with Bainbridge’s and Garnett’s thinking than Professor Litvak’s.