Blogging and Contributing To Legal Scholarship
There is a conference at Harvard, scheduled for April 28th, 2006, entitled "How Blogs are Tranforming Legal Scholarship". Being the curious sort, I downloaded one of the papers written by Eugene Volokh who is one of the contributors to a very popular law blog, Volokh Conspiracy. The site has nothing to do with compliance, scams or frauds, but I was very interested to read his conference paper.
It was a disappointing read. Professor Volokh starts promisingly enough with a crisp account of what legal academics do: discover legal truths, spread knowledge about those truths, and then apply those truths or discoveries, or in his words, "discovering, disseminating, and doing.". Where does Professor Volokh think his contributions on his legal blog fit in? In another nice turn of phrase, he suggests that his blog is contributing to "micro-discoveries", the application of existing legal principles to new fact patterns.
Unfortunately, the entire article could have written 20 years ago, or before the rise of the internet, trackbacks, and tags. There is nothing unique in Professor Volokh's discussion of his blog that could not have been said about any piece of popular writing on the law in any medium. Many of the interesting features of blogs, such as trackbacks, are not even discussed. I don't know how many individuals will trackback from Professor Volokh's blog and find some of the other short entries in www.bizop.ca amusing and or even edifying, but it is a novel feature of blogs that was not present even three years ago. This is entirely different from comments or letters to the Times. The langugage while both clever and engaging disappoints in terms of being even a micro-discovery.
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