Law Faculty Blogs and Disruptive Technology: Law Blogs and a Permanent Place in the Scholarship Continuum

This suggests that faculty law blogs have become a permanent part of the scholarship continuum.  Moreover, this has both relieved law reviews of a significant role but also consigned law reviews to a smaller niche in the scholarship continuum. 

Law reviews will represent a repository for lengthy analysis on legal topics that are typically written in dense prose and heavily footnoted.  To the extent that a legal topic requires detailed and extensive consideration in a non-time sensitive fashion, traditional articles meet these needs.  Particularly in common law systems that accede to courts broad policy discretion, there will always be a need for thoroughly researched pieces that analyze and bring order to areas of law or that suggest alternative approaches. 

Blog commentary has become the place of choice for rapid analysis of current developments.   Quality is to some degree enforced by the intermediation provided by well known, often cited law blogs that have an incentive to maintain their reputation by ensuring high quality posts.  Yet even if weak scholarship occasionally emerges onto the blogosphere, it is not without value.  Bad ideas are still ideas and they can spur a debate that may result in a better end result.   

The full paper, Essay:  Law Faculty Blogs and Disruptive Innovation is here; the underlying data is post here.