Monthly Archive for June, 2007

The world of the legal academic has yet to seriously consider or even acknowledge the law students role in the new, blossoming field of online scholarship see here. Perhaps this is due to the lack of student blogs that actually survive the test of time and consistently post on academic subjects. It also seems that legal academics and practicing attorneys havent quite figured out what exactly their role in online media is, should be, or how it will affect their respective professions. When youre scrambling around to carve out your own niche, you hardly have time to be concerned about finding a space for your students. Fortunately and hopefully, law students are observant, resourceful, and innovative enough to stake out their own piece of cyberspace and ask for recognition in the form of academic credit

Transnational Law Blog: Now is the Time for Law Students to become Pioneers in the Legal Blogosphere
We echo Mr. Bests sentiment that “blogging for credit” should be an essential component of a legal education. My previous post “The Law Students Role in Cyber-Scholarship” explicates reasons why law students should blog and are blogging. According to Mr. Best: [N]ow is the time for law students to become pioneers in the legal blogosphere. Law students who create sophisticated and authoritative blogs will be laying the foundation for legal scholarship in the 21st century. Eventually future law students may consider starting a blog to be as valid as joining a law journal.

Best pointed out that law review articles about the recent Supreme Court ruling in Hudson v. Michigan will not be available for at least a year. However, during the interim, practicing attorneys are attempting to understand, interpret, and apply the ruling; consequently, they are turning to online media for insight, debate, and expert explication. An attorney who relies on the traditional forms of legal publication will have to wait for a year to learn what the experts think. And when the law review articles finally begin to come out months from now, how many of them will have practical value? Some no doubt will be helpful to legal practitioners, but many of the articles will be esoteric and arcane, and some will already be outdated.Best posited that a law student could devote an entire blog to documenting the legal repercussions of the decision. “This blog would become the online authority about the case and its ramifications.” The author of the HvM Blog would analyze court decisions that relied on Hudson; publish articles and link to blog posts by professors and practitioners; link to online conversations about the decision; and follow resultant legislation. “If done well, an HvM Blog would provide immediate benefits to the entire legal profession. Prosecutors and defense attorneys across the country would rely on it as a resource, and judges might even cite the blog in a court opinion.”

Since Best is one of the first and the few law students to receive academic credit for blogging, we look to him for direction in this area. He said, “If law students are inspired by these ideas and create their own legal blogs, they should attempt to get Independent Study credit. This would require finding a faculty sponsor and getting approval from the administration.”