Now is the Time for Law Students to become Pioneers in the Legal Blogosphere

The 3L Epiphany blog encourages law students to become involved in legal scholarship through online media in a post entitled, "Where is the Hudson v. Michigan Blog? - A Suggestion for Law Students" (H/T What About Clients?). The author, Ian Best, recently graduated from law school and, more importantly, received academic credit for his legal blog. We echo Mr. Best's sentiment that "blogging for credit" should be an essential component of a legal education. My previous post "The Law Student's 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will be helpful to legal practitioners, but many of the articles will be esoteric and arcane, and some will already be outdated.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."

The world of the legal academic has yet to seriously consider or even acknowledge the law student's 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 haven't quite figured out what exactly their role in online media is, should be, or how it will affect their respective professions. When you're 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.   

Comments

[John Roach]

The function of a law student's blog should be making legal issues of current interest comprehensible to non-law students and non-lawyers. As people fresh from the real world, law students can appreciate how scary legal issues, such as the legality of the Guantanamo detention centers, can be to tackle from a layman's perspective.

Perhaps it would be useful for schools to give academic credit for the type of specialized blog that Best suggests: "Best posited that a law student could devote an entire blog to documenting the legal repercussions of the [Hudson] decision."

However, one has to question the extent to which legal professions can rely, or should rely, on the blog of a law student. One potential danger of such a reliance would be the inability of the law student to confront and meaningfully advance the large amount of legal scholarship that has already been written on an issue confronted in a newly decided opinion. We have to remember, the law student has a busy schedule and is a novice to the law.

[Travis Hodgkins]

Thanks for letting the cat out of the bag, John!

I absolutely agree that a function of a legal blog is to make legal issues easier to comprehend for lawyers and non-lawyers. Although a law student has a busy schedule, law students generally travel in packs, which means they can start a blog with their friends (ahem, like TLB). And we shouldn't neglect the fact that most people with blogs also have a very busy schedule but they manage to make meaningful contributions to the blogosphere. A legal blog written by law students brings at least a few things to the blogosphere:

(1) Law students will probably revisit issues that law veterans haven't addressed for some time or take for granted, and it will give everyone an opportunity to re-analyze the subject. This is also an opportunity for non-lawyers and other law students to learn as the law student blogger learns the issues.

(2) It sometimes happens that a law student's fresh perspective on an issue illuminates an aspect of the argument that hadn't been brought to light before. It's even possible that a law student will have a completely new and original idea.

(3) Everyone brings their unique life experience and erudition to the blogosphere and, thus, they cast their opinions in their own unique way that will hopefully appeal to an audience-- maybe even a new audience that other blogs haven't reached.

These are just a few that I can list off the top off my head, but I invite other readers to add their comments. I have no doubt that law students contribute to legal scholarship in the blogosphere. For more of my ramblings on the subject, please visit my previous post entitled, "The Law Student's Role in Cyber-Scholarship" and the link is here.