LexBlog Q & A: Paul Caron, Editor-in-Chief of Law Professor Blogs
For today’s LexBlog Q & A, I exchanged e-mails with Paul Caron, currently serving as Charles Hartsock Professor of Law at the University of Cincinnati College of Law.
In addition to his academic duties, Paul writes content for his TaxProf Blog and serves as Editor-in-Chief for Law Professor Blogs, a network of blogs authored by law professors around the country.
1. Rob La Gatta: What type of work does being Editor-in-Chief at Law Professor Blogs entail, and what would you say is the biggest challenge you’ve faced so far in this position?
Paul Caron: My main job is to recruit editors to start blogs in other areas of law patterned after TaxProf Blog. We now have approximately 50 blogs and 100 editors. The biggest challenge is to find folks who are both leaders in their fields and suited [with the] talent and temperament to be bloggers.
2. Rob La Gatta: Since you starting watching the blogosphere, do you believe blogs have played a role in how law professors teach or publish their ideas? Can blogging have a positive impact on a law professor’s reputation?
Paul Caron: Blogs have had a profound impact on both law teaching and legal scholarship. Shameless plug: the Washington University Law Review has just published the papers from the symposium we held at Harvard Law School in April 2006, Bloggership: How Blogs Are Transforming Legal Scholarship, 84 Wash. U. L. Rev. 1025-1261 (2006). The papers and commentary talk in detail about the impact of blogs on legal scholarship.
3. Rob La Gatta: Blogs have obviously made communication between lawyers around the country much easier. Do you believe that these new opportunities – which can ultimately result in new forms of collaboration between lawyers – are advancing society’s overall knowledge of the law?
Paul Caron: Absolutely. My friend and co-blogger Doug Berman at Ohio State calls this “scholarship in action.” Blogs empower law professors to leave the ivory tower and inject their ideas immediately into the legal community, rather than wait years until a law review article is written and published.
4. Rob La Gatta: Some critics of blogs argue that they are not as effective or legitimate as law review journals because they are not peer reviewed; blog defenders, meanwhile, believe that the peer review is instantaneous – people are reading what you write, and if it isn’t accurate, it will be criticized (or at the very least, ignored). What position do you take on this? Do you believe blogs are peer reviewed?
Paul Caron: It is not an either/or proposition. As Larry Solum has pointed out, blogs are merely a mechanism (like law reviews) for distributing scholarly ideas. But blogs permit law professors to have a more immediate impact and in many cases shape the development of the law, which can then be reinforced through the publication of law reviews.
Our conference on the impact of blogs on legal scholarship offers a great example. The event was held in April 2006, and attracted a lot of attention in the blogosphere. Those who could not attend the event at Harvard could watch the webcast and read the commentary of those who live-blogged the conference. And the papers were made available on the Internet. The papers were finally published this month by the Washington University Law Review – over 18 months later!
As you know, most law reviews are student-edited and thus not peer-reviewed. But blog posts are subject to searching, immediate peer-review. If you say something that is not right, there is a phalanx of bloggers ready and willing to tell you.
5. Rob La Gatta: As legal blogs continue to gain popularity, what do you think will happen to traditional law reviews?
Paul Caron: Law reviews have already adjusted. Many of the top law reviews have launched on-line supplements to compete with the immediacy of blogs. Examples include:
- University of Connecticut (CONNtemplations)
- Harvard University (Forum)
- University of Michigan (First Impressions)
- Northwestern University (Colloquy)
- University of Southern California (Postscript)
- University of Texas (See Also)
- University of Illinois (Law Forum)
- University of Pennsylvania (PENNumbra)
- University of Virginia (In Brief)
- Yale University (Pocket Part)
And more and more law reviews are making their articles immediately available for free on their websites. Just this week, the Concurring Opinions blog announced a “Law Review Table of Contents Project” through which law reviews will post links to articles as they are published.
That does it for today’s LexBlog Q & A. Keep checking back for more updates to this ongoing series. Got somebody you think we should interview who blogging lawyers might be interested in hearing from? Drop me a line.