Law Faculty Blogs and Disruptive Innovation: A Conclusion

Where does this leave blogging by law faculty?

First, law blogging is a disruptive innovation that has the capacity to affect faculty reputation, law school rankings, and the continuum of legal scholarship.

Second, a class of widely recognized and widely cited faculty law blogs has emerged.  These blogs reflect some level of intermediation and have become a trusted source of legal authority.

Third, faculty law blogs, at least those that are widely recognized and widely cited, represent a form of scholarship.  They address a gap left in the scholarship continuum left over by traditional law reviews.  Moreover, the effort to reduce this role through the implementation of online supplements has so far failed. 

Fourth, as a disruptive technology, faculty law blogging represents a mechanism for challenging the status quo with respect to faculty reputation.  The evidence indicates that blogging can lead to an increase in faculty reputation (evidenced by a correlation with SSRN rankings).  Moreover, other evidence of faculty reputation comes from surveys of the number of citations in legal periodicals by faculty.  Blog posts written by faculty that are cited in legal publications are counted as citations in these surveys.  Thus, blogging may elevate a faculty member's ranking in this metric as well.  

Fifth, as a disruptive innovation, faculty law blogs provide a mechanism that can be used by non-elite law schools to improve their reputation and their rankings.  With few barriers to entry, faculty law blogs can increase the awareness of a law school.  Moreover, the very top schools have not targeted faculty law blogging.  As a result, it provides a unique opportunity for faculty at less elite law schools.  The evidence suggests that in fact these schools are taking advantage of this opportunity.   

Sixth, the most significant barrier to blogging is time.  Law schools using blogging as a means of increasing awareness would rationally want to create an internal system of rewards designed to promote the practice.  In addition to rewarding the practice in the context of salary determinations (not to mention tenure and promotion), law schools presumably could encourage blogging at the expense of other activities. 

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