Digg This: Leading Law Reviews Collaborate to Introduce Online "Legal Workshop"

As Doug Berman has written, seven law reviews form the founding membership in a new online forum, a "Legal Workshop" that allows one-stop-shopping for cutting-edge legal scholarship.

The founding members:

Cornell Law Review
Duke Law Journal
Georgetown Law Journal
New York University Law Review
Northwestern University Law Review
Stanford Law Review
University of Chicago Law Review
 

Some have worried about the initial set of papers posted to the forum and to the perhaps over-ambitious hope to reach the general public with bite-sized versions of scholarship. But I want to make two different observations about the Workshop's ability to circulate scholarship among the smaller universe of potential readers of legal scholarship, a function that Larry Solum's blog and other blogs also serve.

First, this workshop marks a technological innovation that may prove significant: it seeks to introduce social networking tools to legal scholarship.  It allows readers to "Digg" an article or share it on Facebook or LinkedIn.  

While it is hard to imagine law review articles displacing interest in Britney Spears or iPhone news or "64 Things Every Geek Should Know" (one of the top five items on Digg in the last week), it seems quite likely that readers will find it useful to highlight legal scholarship in this way. I suspect that readers will run across work of interest that they would not have otherwise found through this method.

Second, this Workshop by its very nature has an open access quality. It does not hoard information, limiting it to paid subscribers only. Rather it offers easily accessible, one-click reading of the nation's top scholarship.

We law professors often have the privilege of having the nation's top law reviews hand delivered to our office by our librarians.  Now the world can share in this privilege.

Anupam Chander