Interview With Dean Caron On Importance of Law Professor Blogging

Lexblog published an interview with the Editor in Chief of the Law Professor Network, Dean Paul Caron which this blog is proudly a member of.  As you could expect, Paul explains that blogs have changed the face of legal scholarship and will continue to do so. A taste of this interesting interview is as follows:

    Rob La Gatta: Blogs have obviously made communication between lawyers around the country much easier. Do you believe that these new opportunities - which can ultimately result in new forms of collaboration between lawyers - are advancing society's overall knowledge of the law?

Paul Caron: Absolutely. My friend and co-blogger Doug Berman at Ohio State calls this "scholarship in action." Blogs empower law professors to leave the ivory tower and inject their ideas immediately into the legal community, rather than wait years until a law review article is written and published.

Rob La Gatta: Some critics of blogs argue that they are not as effective or legitimate as law review journals because they are not peer reviewed; blog defenders, meanwhile, believe that the peer review is instantaneous - people are reading what you write, and if it isn't accurate, it will be criticized (or at the very least, ignored). What position do you take on this? Do you believe blogs are peer reviewed?

Paul Caron: It is not an either/or proposition. As Larry Solum has pointed out, blogs are merely a mechanism (like law reviews) for distributing scholarly ideas. But blogs permit law professors to have a more immediate impact and in many cases shape the development of the law, which can then be reinforced through the publication of law reviews.

Our conference on the impact of blogs on legal scholarship offers a great example. The event was held in April 2006, and attracted a lot of attention in the blogosphere. Those who could not attend the event at Harvard could watch the webcast and read the commentary of those who live-blogged the conference. And the papers were made available on the Internet. The papers were finally published this month by the Washington University Law Review - over 18 months later!

As you know, most law reviews are student-edited and thus not peer-reviewed. But blog posts are subject to searching, immediate peer-review. If you say something that is not right, there is a phalanx of bloggers ready and willing to tell you.

Mitchell H. Rubinstein