Legal blogs as scholarship : Views from Canada

Ottawa’s Michel-Adrien Shepard shares a story from Lawyers Weekly on Canadian law scholars view of legal blogs being scholarly works.

• University of Calgary law school dean Alastair Lucas sees blogs as scholarship. The law school is creating a blog dealing with Alberta courts and tribunals and those contributions ‘will require theory development, synthesis, analysis and clear argumentation (…) We also expect that some blog pieces will be expanded into law review articles and the like. Strictly, these are not peer reviewed, in the law journal sense, but they will be reviewed and edited in the faculty under the supervision of senior faculty members.’
• Philip Bryden, dean of law at the University of New Brunswick: Blogs offer ‘timely publication and ease of accessibility’, but adds, ‘During my tenure as dean … none of my colleagues has brought their blogging activity into the scholarly assessment process at UNB, but that is not to say it will not happen in the future.’
• Bruce Archibald, a law professor at Dalhousie University in Halifax: Blogs ‘are a source of ideas which would have to be acknowledged in a footnote if quoted. On the other hand, they are not peer reviewed and would not have the added cachet or weight of that status.’

Shepard goes on to reference a series of posts he’s written on the subject.

Traditional legal scholars may resist the trend of legal blogs being viewed as legal scholarship, but the train has left the station on this one.

Just because a practicing lawyer or law professor writes to the net as opposed to a word document then published to law review does not by necessity make the piece one lacking value as legal scholarship. And the chilling effect of wide dissemination with immediate critique and comment from peer law professors and practicing lawyers is certainly the equal of a law review article reviewed by law students.

Sure, there are blogs published by lawyers that don’t rise to the level of legal scholarship, but let’s not throw the baby out with the bath water on this one.