Bloggership: The Role of the Law Professor Blogger

A. Michael FroomkinUniversity of Miami School of LawApril 28, 2006

Framing

I do three types of bloggingActivist: ICANNWatch.org (1999) “Personal”: Discourse.net (2003)Teacher: several classroom blogs at

umlaw.net (2004)They each taught me something

But First, A Warning

“The plural of anecdote is ‘Blog’”-- Alex Harrowell, http://fistfulofeuros.net/archives/002493.php

This Medium is Not a Message‘Blog’ is about easy packaging of existing

toolsPart of an ecology of tools

Listservers are not deadVery dependant on underlying layers

Vulnerable to comment & trackback spamIs It Even a Medium?

Are blogs more like magazines ?Or, to use, TV metaphor, a form like a sitcom or

the local news

The Case for Blogs as Special

Tools do shape content ‘Power corrupts – and PowerPoint corrupts absolutely’

Blogs are popular – and that matters: ‘Quantity has a quality all its own’

Technoquirks Orin’s “RCO” – reverse chronological order Links Comments Trackbacks Google rankings, TLB Ecosystem, Technorati The long tail, the ‘A’ List, ‘B’ list, etc.

Not so new, but never so evident (cf. Caron) – is this what we value now?

How different is the hierarchy (as evidenced by this event) from the one that we had before?

Is There a Blog ‘Voice’?

Blogging vs. law review articles Blog discipline

Informal No editors Links instead of footnotes Continual feedback (hits, links vs. placement)

Not ‘undisciplined’ but very different from the law journals, books, treatises world

I write differently in each type of blog (and again in law review articles)

What Are Blogs Good For (I)

Activism Making Visible (“Bully pulpit”)

Mau-mauing the MSM Specialist

ICANNWatch Organizing

Campaign tools Bearing Witness

“Public Intellectual” Out-of-sub-discipline scholarship

Torture memos

What Are Blogs Good For (II)

AwarenessBashman, Solum In-field

Lots of tech blogs, IP blogsWhere are the adlaw blogs?

Out of fieldMirror of Justice

Error detection E.g. Eric Muller & Greg Robinson on Malkin's In

Defense of Internment

What Blogs Are Not So Good For

This event is not being conducted on a blog

Traditional Treatises (but see wikis)Heriot disagrees ??

DetailsFootnotes do have valueFootnotes may even be the key to lawyers’

claim to belonging in universities instead of trade schools.

Is Something Missing?

Things that work Activist? √ Recent development awareness (cases, crises) √ Hot newsy topical discussion √

But filtering of academic writing is still uneven, What’s new in the law reviews? What should I

read? SRRN is only very lightly filtered And, there’s Larry Solum

But Larry reads too much

So none of this is exactly the filtering I want…

What I Plan to Do About It: JOTWELL

“The Journal of What We Like (Lots)”

Jotwell.com

Short (2-4pp) reviews of academic work Explaining why it’s worth reading Appreciations of new contributions, maybe situating

them in a literature An intermediary between readers and the torrent of

SSRN / BePress & journals Maybe the occasional re-appreciation of a classic

Bloggy: Room for comments and discussion Not bloggy: will not publish too often Organizational issue: general interest or some

topical division?

What It Is Not

Not the legal version of the Journal of Economic Literature

Not review articles of a topicNot about what is in other blogs

Not even their scholarly contributions…at least in version 1.0

Why Write for Jotwell?

You read the article You loved the article You want to draw attention to the article Law reviews don’t publish “book reviews” of

articles Our profession over-values “critique” and

under-celebrates what deserves praise By calling attention to interesting new

scholarship, you can help promote interesting discussions, in the best traditions of the academy

Thank you

froomkin@law.tmhttp://www.discourse.net http://www.icannwatch.org… and, soon, http://www.jotwell.com