Monday, July 30, 2007
Brown on Blogs, Law School Rankings, and the Race to the Bottom
Jay Brown's Blogs, Law Schools Rankings, and the Race to the Bottom is up on ssrn. This is both an insightful commentary on the role of blogs in legal scholarship and the mechanics of blogging. I think the paper will generate some talk. Professor Brown's abstract reads:
Blogs are changing legal scholarship.
Although not a substitute for the detailed, often intricately
researched analysis contained in law reviews and other scholarly
publications, they fill an important gap in the scholarly continuum.
Blog posts can generate ideas and discussion that can be transformed
into more a systematic and thorough paper or scholarly article. At the
same time, blogs provide a forum for testing ideas once they are
published in more traditional venues.
While
over time, a blog presence will likely become de rigueur for top
scholars and law reviews, top tier schools as a group have not yet
targeted blogs as a necessary component of scholarly activity. In the
short term, therefore, blogs provide unique opportunities for faculty
and law schools outside the top tier to enhance their reputational
rankings. Blogs can enhance reputation by allowing faculty to route
around some of the biases in law review placements and SSRN rankings
that favor those at the top tier schools. Blogs also represent a cost
effective mechanism for advertising scholarly activity.
The
paper discusses the evidence that blogs enhance reputation and surveys
the way that scholars at law schools outside the top tier are already
harnessing blogs to enhance their reputations. The paper also discusses
what it takes to create a successful blog, from the search for content
to the benefits of advertising. The paper finishes with a brief history
of The Race to the Bottom, a corporate governance blog.
Alfred L. Brophy
Comments are held for approval, so they will not appear immediately.
https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/property/2007/07/brown-on-blogs-.html