Law School Innovation

Livestreaming litigation as real-world education

Prof. Charlie Nesson convinced Judge Nancy Gertner (US District Court, MA) to allow videocameras to stream coverage of the proceedings in RIAA vs. Tenenbaum, one of the most high-profile (and perhaps last) cases in which the record industry is going after an individual for alleged copyright infringement. Nesson has always seen this case as not just an effort to vindicate Tenenabaum, but also a learning opportunity for people (and not just law students) to see the law in action.

The cases will be "narrowcast" by Courtroom View Network onto the website of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard. I'll be curious if anyone plans to make use of this opportunity for their classes.

Globe coverage

Nesson's self-coverage

(The RIAA itself has, unsurprisingly, been tight-lipped on this issue, particularly as they recently decided against any future efforts of the same kind).

An exciting honor from the ABA for LSI

 I was both extraordinarily excited and quite surprised to discover that LSI has won a place on the ABA's latest and greatest list of the best legal blogs.  This post on the ABA's blog, titled "50 New Sites Make 2nd Annual ABA Journal Blawg 100," provides the basic back story:

On our second annual list of the best legal blogs, just half of last year’s honorees make a return appearance.

What explains the high turnover? For one thing, every day new legal blogs are started, and some existing blogs—including some that appeared on last year’s list—cease to be updated regularly. Plus, some of the upstart blogs are just plain better than some that made the cut last year.

This year, blogs that aren’t updated at least weekly—no matter how interesting—often didn’t make the grade. We put a premium on blogs that broke news in 2008, or were among the first to provide trenchant analysis of one or more breaking legal news stories.

Speaking for the whole LSI team, I feel comfortable saying we are all grateful and honored that the folks at ABA put this blog on its Top 100 list.  We are in some impressive company as one of 15 blogs nominated in the Professors category of the ABA Journal Blawg 100.

Posted by DAB

Law school faculty blogs: Louisville's approach

I heartily concur in Anupam Chander's sentiment that a law school faculty blog represents "a cheap, easy and effective tool to communicate ideas on a current basis to the public." I also welcome the Marquette University Law School Faculty Blog as the newest variation on this very effective form of law school innovation.

At the University of Louisville, we've hosted a faculty-wide blog since fall 2007. Louisville's faculty-wide blog, accessible at http://www.law.louisville.edu/blog, aggregates smaller, independent blogs written by individual faculty members. A very good example is Tony Arnold's blog, Mapping the Landscape: Resources on Land Use & the Environment.

Interested readers therefore have two ways of following Tony's work. They may read his observations on land use and environmental law by reading Mapping the Landscape: Resources on Land Use & the Environment, or better yet, subscribing to its RSS feed. Other readers follow Louisville's consolidated faculty blog in its entirety, which likewise has an RSS feed of its own.

For my part, I maintain an official dean's blog called The Cardinal Lawyer. Together, my colleagues' individual blogs, the consolidated University of Louisville Law Faculty Blog, and The Cardinal Lawyer have drawn positive attention from our students, from our alumni, from the broader practicing bar, and from legal academia at large.

Jim Chen

Why Don't All Law Faculties Have Blogs?

Marquette University Law School has just announced a new faculty blog.  Marquette joins a number of other institutions, including, of course, the University of Chicago Law School and the Georgetown Law School in offering commentary through this electronic medium.  (See my comment on "Crowdsourcing Obama's Exams" here at the University of Chicago Law Blog.)

Marquette's Dean Joseph Kearney opens the blog by recalling the launch of the Marquette Law Review almost a century ago: On the opening page of the journal it was maintained that “the institution which would expand and fulfill its mission must make known its ideals and communicate its spirit.” W.A. Hayes, Foreword, 1 Marq. L. Rev. 5 (1916). At that time it was clear that “[t]he most effective way of doing both is by means of a suitable magazine.” Id.

Law Schools now utilize a number of methods to disseminate faculty scholarship: (1) law reviews; (2) a law school magazine largely targeted at alumni and fellow academics; (3) occasional papers; and (4) reprints sent by hardcopy. The electronic medium adds: (5) blogs; (6) online forums associated with law reviews; (7) iTunes-style podcasts; and (8) YouTube-style video. (Perhaps others can add to this total so that we can reach a nice round 10!)

Blogs seem a cheap, easy and effective tool to communicate ideas on a current basis to the public--and to invite commentary on the same.  The "talking back" made possible through the commentary is a major improvement from the dim possibility of writing a letter to the editor of law reviews, which typically did not provide a forum for quick responses in their print journals.

Anupam Chander

Does a Critical Remark About Opinions Expressed By a Commenter or Blogger On Another Blog Constitute Bullying?

Following up on Mark Osler's post, there are two issues:  one is advance notification to commenters. The second, using trackbacks to give to bloggers a heads-up. Chime in and take our just launched polls at A Kierkegaardian Leap of Faith in Social Media on Law Librarian Blog. -- Joe Hodnicki

Examining state of the law professor blogosphere

As noted here on The Race to the Bottom blog, Professor J. Robert Brown has just posted a paper on law faculty blogs, Of Empires, Independents, and Captives: Law Blogging, Law Scholarship, and Law School Rankings on SSRN.  Here is the abstract:

Law faculty blogs have been around for much of the new millennium. This article examines these blogs, including their role in the legal scholarship continuum and their growing influence of legal community.

The paper begins with an evolutionary study, noting that law blogging originally began in a state of nature, with few rules governing frequency or content of posts. Increased competition and the emergence of Empire and Captive law blogs, however, has resulted in a growing sense of order on the legal blogosphere.  Perhaps as a result, the influence of law blogs has increased.

The paper relies on a list of approximately 130 law faculty blogs and studies the frequency of law review and case citations. The numbers have been undergoing significant growth. The growth is particularly noteworthy given the difficulty in searching for material posted on the Internet.

The paper also studies the impact of law blogging on rankings in the US News. In the short term, blogging can disproportionately benefit law schools and faculty outside the top tier. Blogs can enhance the reputation of the sponsoring faculty member, enable them to route around the biases inherent in the system of law review placements and SSRN downloads, permit a level of participation in the legal debate that might otherwise not be available, and facilitate the dissemination of information important to alumni and other constituencies.  Most critically, however, they represent a cost effective mechanism for improving a law school's reputational rankings and, perforce, its overall rankings in the infamous US News and World Report.

Much of the data used in the paper is derived from a list of 130 law faculty blogs, something paired down to the top 50 law faculty blogs. The top 50 was determined based upon a number of ranking metrics. These lists are included as an Appendix to this article.

The paper makes for a very interesting read, and it provides an especially thorough and thoughtful (pro-blogging) descriptive review of the current state and apparent impact of law professor blogs.  Still, I must admit that I crave more law prof blogging navel-gazing.  Specifically, I hope that Professor Brown, or perhaps others, will build on this work to provide a more critical meta-analysis of law professor blogging, especially as it relates to broader law school innovation issues and the role of law professors in the broader legal and political community.

Posted by DAB

A bloggy interview at LexBlog

In this post at LexBlog, Rob La Gatta has put up an interview we did last week discussing, inter alia, how I see blogging impacting traditional legal scholarship:  Here are parts of our Q and A:

Rob La Gatta: Do you believe blogs have played a positive role in how law professors teach/articulate their ideas and get their message across?

Doug Berman: Yes, absolutely...although I would say that blogging is a unique kind of media for expressing law professor ideas.  I’ve been very fortunate to work in a field and to have kind of an A.D.D. attitude towards it that makes blogs a particularly useful way for me to get out a lot of smaller ideas.  But I think for those who are interested in longer-form idea development or other more traditional aspects of the scholarly conversation, blogs can be more challenging than beneficial.  That’s where my big support for faculty blogging is based: a vision of the diversity of mediums that are valuable to get ideas out....

Rob La Gatta: How have you seen traditional law reviews adjusting to handle the growth of the blogosphere?

Doug Berman: These online supplements are a very direct acknowledgment of one thing that the blogs have contributed to the law professor universe: sometimes, law professors have things they want to say and can valuably say in 500 words rather than 500,000 words.

Berkman + CALI to sponsor blogger events at AALS 2008

CALI and Berkman invite law prof bloggers to two special events at AALS 2008: a private luncheon on blogging and its role in legal education, and an open meetup space in the Exhibition Hall. We're almost out of seats for the lunch, but there's still time to reserve a meetup time slot. Some bloggers have fretted that the meetups will feel like a "bloggers on display" booth, but have no fear: we're setting up the space like a living room, not a "meet the author" receiving line.

I wonder if LSI can team up with PrawfsBlawg and the other school-oriented blogs to host a joint meetup?

Download the announcement (PDF) and contact me to reserve a spot.

GK

Top blawgs for would-be law school innovators

The folks at Blawg Review have created this meme throughout the blawgosphere urging the creation of a "list of blawgs that are 'simply the best.'"  Rather than jump into the "best" game, I thought it made more sense here to list what I consider the be the most important blawg reads for would be law-school innovators.  Here goes (in alphabetical order):

• Brian Leiter's Law School Reports
• Concurring Opinions
• Empirical Legal Studies
• How Appealing
• Legal Profession Blog
• Mauled Again
• MoneyLaw
• PrawfsBlawg
• TaxProf Blog
• The Volokh Conspiracy

I am sure I am leaving out some useful reads, so perhaps readers in the comments will flag other blogs that talk about legal education and its possible reforms.

On a tangential front, I think someone (perhaps the folks at Law Blog Metrics) ought to be tracking and analyzing which types of blawgs are making the most best 10 lists.

Posted by DAB

Live blogging my panel on blogging at Chicago-Kent

I fear it is not polite for me to live blog the panel on which I am speaking at  this great conference at the Chicago-Kent College of Law entitled "Back to the Future of Legal Research."  (The full details of this very interesting conference can be found at this link.)  But even though I won't live blog, this post provides a forum for attendees (and others) to share comments and reactions.  Please do.

Denver Law Faculty and Students to Blog the Nacchio Trial

Denver Law Prof Jay Brown is taking collaborative faculty-student blogging to new heights by providing daily coverage of the criminal trial of Joe Nacchio, the former CEO of Qwest Communications International at Race to the Bottom. Professor Brown writes that the Nacchio trial is "really the end of an era, the last big trial from the Enron days."

The trial is scheduled to begin today and is expected to last approximately 8 weeks. Students and faculty will rotate through each day of the trial with the expectation that there will be at least two posts a day. -- Joe Hodnicki

Blogging's beneficiary and a revolution coming

Ilya Somin in this post flags Jack Balkin's notable discussion here at his blog of which law professors may benefit the most from professional blogging.  Here's what Jack says:

The most successful blogs tend to be run by younger law professors who aren't necessarily at the top-ten schools. That's because if you're an established professor at a top-ten school, you are already probably getting significant positive reinforcement for what you are doing.  But if you're a law professor who's trying to establish a name for yourself, you quite understandably feel that not enough people are paying attention to what you're saying.  The blogosphere is a wonderful way for you to put your ideas out there and gain an audience for ideas you think are valuable and worthwhile.  Blogging democratizes legal commentary; it publicizes the scholarship and the expertise of a large number of law professors who would not have gotten a voice before.

This comment resonates with me because because it is so very clear that my sentencing blog has proved to be a wonderful way for me to put out my ideas and gain an audience. 

But Jack's comment also portends a coming revolution.  The label of "younger law professors who aren't necessarily at the top-ten schools" describes perhaps 70% of current law professors and essentially 100% of wanna-be law professors.  If blogging continues to be an especially valuable medium for an especially large percentage of law professors, I predict it is only a matter of time before every law professor is expected to have (or contribute to) a legal blog of one sort or another.

The launch of my death penalty class blog

As first noted here, this semester I am experimenting with a class blog for my course on the Death Penalty.  Today was my first class, and thus also became the day for launching the new blog, cleverly titled Death Penalty Course @ Moritz College of Law.  Though I am doing all the blogging right now, in a few weeks I am going to expect students not just to read the blog, but also to do some posting.

As detailed by this post on the new blog, I already like having the class blog as a means to  immediately follow-up on issues discussed in class.  Of course, it remains to be seen if students will like or appreciate that I now have a means to  immediately follow-up on issues discussed in class.

Posted by DAB.

Are law professor blogs like so five minutes ago?

Peter Spiro in this post at OpinioJuris thoughtfully examines whether "the blogging phenomenon may have peaked" in the legal arena, and a terrific set of commentors have enriched the inquiry.  This comment by Dave Hoffman especially caught my attention:

[I]t seems unlikely that law professors (the audience and participants I care about) will continue to blog at high numbers for much longer if (a) institutions don't commit to reward the activity; or (b) it doesn't pay.  Since I think both of these possibilities are long-shots (and the first possibly normatively undesirable) I too see a downward trend in total bloggers.  That doesn't mean that the ones left will die on the vine, just that the gold rush time is at a conclusion.

The "does blogging pay" issue is intriguing because a good number of prominent law professor blogs (e.g., Althouse, Banbridge, the entire Law Prof Blog Network) have ads of some sort.  But I am even more intrigued and troubled by Dave's assertion that it is a "long-shot" and "possibly normatively undesirable" for law schools to commit to reward the activity of law professor blogging.

Of course, I am not suggesting that law schools should reward what I would call "pure pleasure blogging" by law professors (a type of blogging I do on some occasions with colleagues at The Golf Blog).  But, I do think that law schools should reward (and thus incentivize) what I call "scholarship-in-action blogging" for reasons I have explained in this article.  As I explain in my article, there can be so many positive and productive aspects of law professor blogging which can and should dovetail with a law professor's professional goals and the broader missions of law schools.

Perhaps the blog-friendly new Dean of the Brandeis School of Law at the University of Louisville is already thinking about how he should reward blogging faculty.