Law School blogs attracting law professors

In what’s going to be the rule, not the exception, in coming years talented law professors are going to publish at law school blogs, not just law reviews.

Leading law professor blogger, Dan Solove, an Associate Professor of Law at George Washington University and publisher of Concurring Opinions, announced today that Washington & Lee Law School Professor Melissa Waters is ‘joining us as a permablogger.’

Melissa… teaches international law, foreign relations law, civil procedure, and conflicts of law. She received both her J.D. and her B.A. from Yale University, and did graduate work at the Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium. Prior to entering law teaching, Professor Waters was a law clerk to Judge Morris S. Arnold on the Eighth Circuit, and a litigator at Williams & Connolly in Washington, DC.

From 2000-2001, she worked at the U.S. Department of State as Senior Advisor to Harold Hongju Koh, Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights & Labor. She also served as a consultant to the Soros Foundation Open Society Institute, and as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Law at Case Western Reserve Law School.

Her current research focuses on the role of domestic courts as mediators between the domestic and international legal regimes, and on the impact of transnational judicial dialogue on the development of international legal norms. She also consults on human rights training and rule of law programs worldwide, focusing most recently on human rights training programs for judges from Iraq and from Central Asia.

As I responded to a lawyer’s question last week in New York City, expect law school blogs with heavy law professor participation to take off. There’s too much upside.

• Much faster recognition for law professors as leading authorities in their area of the law than with publishing law reviews.
• Content is more current. Can be edited and supplemented by the day.
• Immediate and broader peer review. Law professors on the relevant topic will subscribe to RSS feeds of particular blogs and keywords and key phrases.
• Innovative publishing medium such as blogging will attract leading law professors to law schools which support blogs.
• Legal academia interaction with practicing lawyers in real time via both sides participating in blog publishing and commenting.

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