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Tuesday, September 8, 2009

2009 Legal Educator Blog Census, Version 2.0 (Schools A-M)

A Bill for taking a census has passed the House of Representatives, and is within the Senate. It contained a schedule for ascertaining the component classes of the Society, a kind of information extremely requisite to the Legislator, and much wanted for the science of Political Economy. A repetition of it every ten years would hereafter afford a most curious and instructive assemblage of facts. It was thrown out by the Senate as a waste of trouble and supplying materials for idle people to make a book. Judge by this little experiment of the reception likely to be given to so great an idea as that explained in your letter of September.

-Letter from James Madison to Thomas Jefferson, February 14, 1970

Of course, Madison's projection was incorrect as Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution eventually provided that "[t]he actual Enumeration [of the population] shall be made within three years after the first meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent term of ten years, in such manner as they shall by law direct." Part of the reason that the framers made a decennial census a Constitutional requirement was that "[t]he census serves a vital statistical database that tells us who we are and where we are going as a nation."

The purpose of this legal educator blog census is similar: telling us which legal educators are blogging and where the blogosphere is headed. Beginning in 2005, Daniel Solove and company began publishing a Law Professor Blogger Census. As an aspiring law professor at the time, I found that census to be an extremely useful tool for putting my finger on the pulse of legal academia. The last Law Professor Blogger Census was posted in August 2007, just as I entered the academy. When I asked Professor Solove earlier this year about whether he had any plans on preparing a new version, he informed me that he had no current plans and that I had his permission to prepare an update.

What follows is the first draft of what I am calling the Legal Educator Blogger Census because I have decided to list anyone who might be involved in the education of students at law schools in the United States: full time professors, adjunct professors, deans, legal writing instructors, law librarians, etc. I used the same methodology as Professor Solove in preparing my census: Anyone who posted at least one entry on a blog during a three month period (January 1, 2009-March 30, 2009) qualified for inclusion (except for guest bloggers).

I realize that in the rapidly changing world of the blogosphere, this census is already somewhat out of date. For instance, my Census attributes CrimProf Blog to Mark Godsey, who was running it earlier this year, rather than the folks at the University of San Diego School of Law, who relaunched it a few days ago. For a list of blogs that were started after March and bloggers who started posting on blogs after March, you can click here.

I hope that this Census, which I plan on updating annually, will serve at least three purposes: (1) giving those presently interested in the law a central location to be able to locate every legal educator blog; (2) tracking the changes in the number and type of legal educator blogs/bloggers per year; and (3) giving those interested in the law in the future an ability to track down legal educator blogs that might otherwise have disappeared without a trace.

I would like to thank my wife Zoe for her invaluable assistance in the preparation of this census.

This post lists the blogs containing posts by legal educators at schools starting with the letter A-M. The next post lists the blogs containing posts by legal educators at schools starting with the letter N-Z. For an alphabetical listing of blogs, you can click here. For statistics I compiled regarding the census, you can click here.

2009 Legal Educator Blog Census, Version 2.0 (Schools A-M)

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