Law Faculty Blogs and Influence: The Case of Law Review Citations (Part 2)

We are examining the influence of law faculty blogs, something addressed in greater detail in my paper, Of Empires, Independents, and Captives:  Law Blogging, Law Scholarship, and Law School Rankings.

There has been considerable traffic in recent weeks about law blogs and the frequency of law review citations. The topic came up first on a post by Orin Kerr at The Volokh Conspiracy.  Jack Balkin picked up the cudgel onBalkinization, with the thread spreading toConcurring Opinions, The Law Librarian, and The Conglomerate, most of them providing tallies for their own blog.  The topic providedBrian Leiter withanother opportunity to disparage blogs as a scholarly endeavor.  Much of the discussion concerned the perceived increase in the number of citations over the last three or four years.  This post will look at the issue from a different perspective. 

The debate could benefit from some more comprehensive numbers.  At the same time, the debate over the growing influence of law faculty blogs is, at some level, a fight about the last war.  The blogs are growing in influence.  The appropriate discussion, therefore, ought to center around the positive, that is things to do to increase influence, or the negative, things to avoid to prevent harm to influence. 

In my recently posted paper, Of Empires, Independents, and Captives: Law Blogging, Law Scholarship, and Law School Rankings, I put together a list of approximately 130 law faculty blogs.  The list only includes blogs sponsored by full time faculty (thereby excluding the law blog by Judge Posner, despite his adjunct status at Chicago) and blogs generically sponsored by law schools (Chicago, Georgetown, Houston, Louisville and Pittsburg have these types of blogs). 

Below is a list of the top 20 law faculty blogs by law review citation (taken from the Lexis-Nexis data base of law reviews and ABA journals).  The searches were run on different days during early to mid-February 2008.  The numbers can change as new issues of journals appear in the Lexis-Nexis data base.

Sentencing Law and Policy --- 156

Jurist- Forum -------------------------- 156

Volokh Conspiracy ----------------- 135

Balkinization -------------------------- 106

LessigBlog ------------------------------ 79

Patently O ------------------------------- 73

Jurist- Paper Chase ----------------- 50

Concurring Opinions --------------- 45

White Collar Crime Prof Blog -- 44

Prawfs Blawg -------------------------- 37

ProfessorBainbridge ---------------- 36

Conglomerate -------------------------- 32

Ideoblog ---------------------------------- 29

Instapundit ------------------------------- 25

TaxProf Blog ---------------------------- 25

Tech. and Marketing Law Blog - 23

Confrontation Blog -------------------- 23

Althouse ------------------------------------ 20

Legal theory blog ---------------------- 17

Mirror of Justice ------------------------- 16

Brian Leiter's Philosophy Blog --- 15

And, the grand total of law review citations for all of the 130 plus law faculty blogs?  1361.  One suspects that the study, if repeated in subsequent years, will show significant increases in citations. 

One way to look at the number is to realize that these sites have occurred despite the current abysmal state of search engine technology.  Most of these blogs do not appear in the legal data bases (with some exceptions that we will discuss in future posts).  As a result, it is extremely difficult to find relevant posts using Internet search engines.  As search engine technology improves (whether improvements in Internet search engines or an increased presence of law blogs in the relevant legal data bases), the number of citations should increase significantly. 

Tomorrow, we'll look at the number of blogs that have been cited by state or federal courts.

Comments

[Geoff]

If you are trying to use citations in law reviews to measure a blog's influence, shouldn't you exclude from your results those articles that are articles about blogs? I'm not sure how being listed in a footnote as a "popular law professor blog" in an article about how blogs are changing scholarship demonstrate's a blogs influence. As I have expressed before, I wonder if scholarship about whether blogs are scholarship counts as scholarship!

Of course, citation counts are always an imprecise measure of influence, at least when minute differences in citation counts are used to infer influence.

[J. Robert Brown]

I don't disagree but suspect that any law review count of traditional scholarship also includes citations that have little to do with the actual analysis in the piece. I think the data at least demonstrates to those who do not think of blogs as scholarship that they are falling behind the curve.

Jay

[Dennis Crouch]

Jay, Thanks for doing this work. I agree with Geoff that it would be interesting to see break-out citations to substantive legal issues beyond blogging. I actually don't think that the top-end of the list would change dramatically because those blogs are usually heavily substantive. This list is interesting because the names at the top are quite different from a ranking based on the number of site visitors.

[Jim Maule]

Should articles (or judicial opinions) that criticize what's in a blog be counted differently? In a broad sense the author or judge was "influenced" ... by looking at the blog ... but surely not persuaded. In fact, the author or judge was resistant to being influenced in the narrow sense. Perhaps the folks who run the professional citators can bring their interesting tagging to the job?