Orin Kerr has two very interesting posts on how legal blogging is, will, and might affect more mainline legal scholarship. Here was my contribution in the comments:
I think it’s the website of Green Bag that notes the relative absence of “mid-range” legal scholarship out there. That is, you’ve got whatever sum up the AP runs of certain media-worthy court cases, and then you’ve got 60 pages tomes in the Harvard Law Review–and little to nothing in between.
Blogs have helped fill that gap. They provide a way to discuss issues in a less formal and more accessible format than given law reviews, while not sacrificing the institutional expertise and nuance of professional quality work.
Moreover, blogs are far more flexible in their areas of publication than law reviews. While formal legal scholarship must be, for all intents, “novel,” legal blogging is bound by no such constraints. This means that I can learn the background law and rules behind the news without having to research and plough through the path-breaking 1956 article or case that set the principle. Far easier for me, anyway.
Finally, since blogs can post on anything, it provides a badly needed link between some of academia’s brightest minds and the “real world.” While legal academia is not entirely divorced from the here and now–after all, new legal issues and problems are always presenting themselves, the more mundane back and forth of political and even legal discourse is already old hat by the time it reaches the ears of those outside the ivory tower. Blogging let’s their insights reach ours–I don’t care if Eugene Volokh isn’t saying anything new about the latest hate speech law, I’m interested to hear what he’s saying at all. Tenure Review committees (as well as whomever serves as the rough equivilent for tenured faculty) and I have different desires, blogging keeps both of us happy.
David Zaring also chimes in with his thoughts.
As Kerr says, it’s unlikely that (and would be unfortunate if) law blogging replaced traditional legal scholarship. But that doesn’t mean that it can’t influence and direct it in important and interesting ways. As a hopeful to-be law professor, count me as an interested party.