Before there were many lawyers with blawgs, there were lawprofs. They had the blawgosphere largely to themselves, with their networks and back and forth banter in the fascinating jargon of the academy. When the blawgosphere began to expand, with the inclusion of lawyers posting substantively about the issues du jour as well as practical ideas, problems and commentary, we were largely ignored.
That’s when the Texas Tornado, Mark Bennett, came up with the name practical blawgosphere, to express the different path we were traveling, as opposed to that of the academicians. We, perhaps because we came later or perhaps because we had broader horizons, liberally linked to, discussed and considered the issues that floated around the lawprof blawgosphere. The favor was rarely returned.
I recall Anne Reed at Deliberations referring to a post of mine with this observation:
And it’s changing the way we see each other. Back in July, Scott Greenfield was explaining the differences between professor and practitioner bloggers (“They post about academic studies while we post about how young lawyers should never go to court wearing their underpants on the outside, no matter how cool they think it makes them look”). This week he could end a terrific post on the other side of the mortgage crisis with an airy, “H/T Volokh.”
Anne’s point was that the two blawgospheres were slowly edging closer together, beginning to inter-relate and perhaps even feed off one another.
But this week, with Heller and a few other Supreme Court decisions front and center, it occurred to me that the promise of Anne’s observations remains a long way from realization. I keep a bunch of blawgs by lawprofs on my feeds, and find some illuminating, frustrating, helpful and ridiculous. They provide me with ideas for posts here, and I link to them all the time.
What I have not seen is lawprofs doing the same with the practical blawgosphere. Sure, it happens, but it’s still quite rare and certainly nothing comparable to the way they tussle with each other. And I’m not just talking about linking to Simple Justice, but to any of the blawgs in the practical blawgosphere. There were a ton of posts on the same subjects this week, yet almost no cross-fertilization between the two.
Why is this? The only time you can be assured of the lawprofs showing up in the practical blawgosphere is when you post about how they blew something, or don’t get it, or some equally negative aspect of their writing. They can’t bear being criticized, and are there within minutes to defend their honor. But does it have to be negative to catch their attention. Does the practical blawgosphere offer nothing intellectually positive what merits discussion?
Some of my “must-read” blawgs include Volokh Conspiracy, Concurring Opinions, Sentencing Law and Policy, Prawfs Blawg and Turley. Other than Turley, who links to no one and (for whatever reasons) exists as an island in the blawgosphere, the others engage in “blawgversations”. Yet, they really don’t engage in the ideas of real lawyers in the practical blawgosphere in the way they do their fellow lawprofs.
It could be because trench lawyers fail to offer the level of scholarly discussion that the lawprofs feel merit their attention or acknowledgment. We don’t use words like “paternalistic pedagogy” as much as they do. Does this mean that the practical blawgosphere offers nothing of consequence for the scholars? I don’t believe that to be the case, as there is enormous content and controversy abrew in the practical blawgosphere that would add enormously to the academic blawgosphere’s conversation.
Rather, I believe it to be the product of an insularity, a circling the wagons if you will, because of the lawprofs need to prove themselves to their peers and use blawging as a weapon to prove their worth within a community that only cares about its own internal status structure. In other words, they don’t really care much about the ideas or issue, but about how they are viewed by their academic brethren and how it will impact on their tenure track. The practical blawgosphere doesn’t help them achieve higher status, so as far as they are concerned, it doesn’t really exist.
While hiding behind their scholarly demeanor, this really reflects a very unfortunate anti-intellectualism bent. They aren’t really concerned about the issues as much as the impact of their brilliance on their peers. And there’s no purpose in spending their time discussing anything in the practical blawgosphere when they could be impressing their fellow scholars by focusing exclusively on themselves.
So I ask a question of the lawprofs (and I know some of you will read this, so let’s see if you’re willing to come forward and answer this question): Why are you afraid of the practical blawgosphere? Why do you remain insular when there is so much out there to challenge your theories?
I suspect that we will get no answers from the lawprofs. I doubt any will have the balls to step forward and respond. But to my fellow blawgers in the practical blawgosphere, allow me to say that your posts, your ideas and your commentary is every bit as thoughtful, helpful and significant as the lawprofs. You’re just able to express yourselves without the pretentious use of jargon. And the lawprofs are scared to death to admit that they don’t hold a monopoly on meaningful legal thought.
Update: While the lawprofs are hiding their head(s) in the sand, Justice Scalia, bold as ever, is happy to speak out on this topic:
Scalia also reiterated his feeling, expressed in other interviews, that too many of the best minds in the U.S. are wasting away in law. “I think that any system that requires that many of the country’s best minds, and they are the best minds, is too complex,” he said. “If you look at the figures, where does the top of the class in college go to? It goes into law. They don’t go into teaching. Now I love the law, there is nothing I would rather do but it doesn’t produce anything.”
I guess they don’t go into teaching, do they?
Update 2: CrimLaw’s Ken Lammers, who has been around the blawgosphere far longer than I (which is why he looks so much older than me) corrects my timeline errors and general misunderstandings about who was here first, etc. He notes that back when he started, about 70 years ago, lawprofs were not yet deeply involved in blawging, other than Glenn Reynolds (InstaPundit), who was a lawprof but didn’t blawg on lawprof topics.
Ken takes us through the entire history of blawging to point out that those of us who weren’t there at the beginning cannot appreciate how the blawgosphere developed the way it did. To cut to the chase, all the extant problems are, per Ken, his fault entirely. He says he’s sorry and he won’t do it again.
Discover more from Simple Justice
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
I’m going to try an experiment. I’m going to announce that I am now a lawprof, but I will write about the same stuff. Let’s see if they start linking to me.
Just don’t forget to use the jargon. They’re nothing without the jargon.
Don’t let the bloggers represent all law professors. Sounds crazy, I know, but most law professors do not blog! And some (many) are quite practical. Maybe the two go hand-in-hand, who knows.
1. I disagree with the premise. It is my impression that law professor blogs link to each other at the same rate that they link to lawyer blogs. Rarely. Most law prof blogs you list instead link to primary sources – court opinions, dockets, laws, and news stories – pretty much exclusively.
2. The best way to increase your odds of being linked is to email the blogger who you think would be interested in your stuff. I get these kind of emails all the time, but mostly from other law professors. I also send them. I can’t read every blogger’s posts all the time, and emails help. I’ve told you this several times, but you seem to think that emailing is beneath you. So be it. But complaining about being ignored when you haven’t done what everyone else does to be noticed is odd.
3. Stop with the constant drone about elitist theory on law professor blogs. The percent of posts that are of the category you are discussing is minimal, but you act as if it is the whole of the picture. It’s weird, especially when you actually write on the most self-referential & not practical of law professor blogs – one about life in the legal academy! Plus, the complaint about the quality of writing on law professor blogs is also oddly placed. Even practical lawyers could stand to omit more needless words.
4. Too many of your posts are about blogging. These don’t usually encourage people to link, because navel gazing isn’t as interesting to readers as it is to bloggers.
5. Thus, write more about your practice experience and pending legal issues (generally, people should exploit their areas of expertise). Those are the posts of your I enjoy the most.
Jargonfully yours,
Dave.
First, Dave, I thank you for responding, which puts you well above all those other gutless weenies.
Now, let’s address your objections in seriatim, shall we?
1. Bull. Lawprofs go back and forth amongst each other all the time, but rarely (as in never) will they address a non-lawprof blog except to counter a challenge to lawprof hegemony. I read too. I see it. When another lawprof presents a different opinion on some thing (case, issue, theory, news story), the lawprof will link, quote, argue the point. Nothing wrong with that, by the way, except that I’ve seen the same thoughts and issues discussed quite well in non-lawprof blogs, but they are invariably left out of the discussion, at least on the lawprof side. This is all about conversations. We’re happy to have lawprofs join in ours, and invite them whenever appropriate. But do the lawprofs welcome the practicing lawyers into their conversations? (Answer: Nope)
2. No one said anything about begging for links, and that’s a straw man argument. This isn’t about links, but about conversations. But since you raised it, the practical blawgosphere doesn’t send emails back and forth screaming “link to me, link to me!” We read each others stuff and our blawgversations happen organically. We can’t read everything either. In fact, I would venture to say that most working lawyers have less time than lawprofs to read blogs, since we spend more time in court than lawprofs do in court. Yet we manage to get done whatever we have to get done. So I don’t send emails soliciting interest, and never will. Nor does anyone else that I know of in the practical blawgosphere (this excludes those scammers who ask to trade blogrolls, who are not a part of us). It’s not because emailing is beneath me. Well, actually it is. Soliciting interest in my posts is demeaning. Read it if you want, ignore it if you want. But this was never the issue to begin with.
3. Jargon and needless words are not synonymous. One is intended to serve as the secret code, which by definition excludes anyone not part of the fraternity. And note that I leave Moneylaw out of it, since it has no nexus with the real world and hence no reason to involve the practical blawgosphere. But some very interesting fellow asked, about a year ago, whether the blawgosphere was becoming stagnant. His name eludes me. But the point is that there is a whole separate universe that’s developed outside of the academic blawgosphere, that discusses issues, cases, news stories, which as much interest and intellectual vigor as the lawprofs.
Forget about me. What about the rest of them? They are all linked in my blogroll. They think, therefore they are. Have you ever taken a look at them, considered what they are doing and talking about, and asked yourself, “these guys raise interesting stuff and yet it never occurs to me and my fellow lawprofs to engage them in a discussion or even consider joining their conversations?” We’re in the marketplace of ideas as well, and we’ve got coin in our pockets. Is yours better than ours?
4. Another bull. Maybe 10% of my posts are about blogging, 5% on political issues and another 5% about quantum mechanics. That leaves 80% about legal issues. Besides, this isn’t about me. Forget me. Tell me what happened to the rest of the brethren in the practical blawgosphere. No one mentions them either. Are we all just posting about posting? Nu uh. This one is a cop out.
Right now, Windy and Grits, Matlock and Bennett are busy arguing about whether DWI should be a crime at all, or whether it should be subject solely to economic sanctions. It’s a fascinating conversation. If a person drives drunk and makes it home without causing anyone harm, what wrong has happened? And where are the lawprofs on this? Nowhere.
We’re not soliciting links (particularly since soliciting, in our venue, generally results in arrest). We’re wondering why, when lawprofs get ideas from the practical blawgosphere (which we both know happens from time to time), or when we discuss the meaning of SCOTUS decisions, or when we have a great debate about law, nary a mention in the academic blawgosphere. We will never ask for it. I just wonder why the lawprofs can’t admit that they aren’t the only ones in the blawgosphere who have an occasional worthy thought.
1 & 2 are related, and I think are the whole story: The point is, the reason that law professions occasionally engage each other is that they know about what they are doing, through emails. You may wish it were different – that we, like you, have organic “blawgversations”. (A nasty image.) But we don’t, or, at least, I don’t. I don’t have time to surf the whole web, so I surf a very small piece of it, and expect people who want me to know what they are up to will email me about it. I don’t know how to RSS readers, and I don’t care to learn. This is the baseline view, I guess, of many law professor bloggers. It’s not “screaming” to email someone else about what you are up to, it’s simple courtesy. It says, “I recognize you are busy, but maybe you’d be interested in the following post I wrote on a topic that you’d care about.” If you don’t want to email, that’s fine, but you should stop saying that I’m excluding you because you are a lawyer. I’m excluding you because I don’t know what you are writing.
3. Jargon v. needless words: my point was that you harp on this topic all the time, with few examples. I think that the percentage of jargon on law prof blogs is probably higher than it ought to be, but much lower than on non-legal academic blogs. When you see it, call it out, but your sweeping generalizations & constant returning to this critique have, are, imy view, distracting.
4. Your blog: maybe you are right that only 5% of your posts are about blogging. But it doesn’t feel that way. As for your description of economics and DWI, sounds interesting! Maybe someone will email me the links. Or maybe lawyers will do more commenting on academic law blogs, so we can get to know each other more.
There is no chance I’ve a monopoly on interesting thoughts. Indeed, I’m not even a small producer of them. I’m looking for blogging ideas just like everyone else is. Send them my way.
Just out of curiousity (and fairness), I just did a search of SJ to see how many times I’ve used the word “pedagogy”, which is my code for lawprof jargonism. There is a total of 8 posts where the word is found. That’s out of almost 1500 posts. Is it possible that, when you write about my “constant returning to this critique,” you may be just a tad sensitive?
But I can’t imagine lawyers emailing posts around (except Randazza, but he’s a half-breed) for reactions. I guess my feeling is that if you have to ask, well, it’s not worth it.
And my savior is the RSS feed. If I can learn to use it, you most assuredly can. It cuts the time to review my favorite blogs to a fraction of what it was. Without it, I would be lost.
And finally, if the lawprofs didn’t have interesting idea and conversations, we wouldn’t want to join them. So there.
SHG: I did a search in our archives for pedagogy too. I found 15 posts with the word in it, out of around 4000 we’ve written. So, maybe your perceptions are also a little skewed? (Just for fun, I did a search for “jargon” on your site, and came up with 31 hits. For “practical blawgosphere” (an inexact proxy for navel gazing, to be sure), I come up with 49 posts.)
On the RSS v. Email debate, I hear you, but I’m unlikely to join the revolution. Which probably means I will miss out on lots of interesting conversations….
“I keep a bunch of blawgs by lawprofs on my feeds”
Feeds? Feeds?
I thought you didn’t use an RSS reader?
You not-so-luddite-you!
Sigh. You were right. I can’t do it without my feed. I didn’t want to, but I had no choice.
I never promised not to do it again.
And I may have overstated your contrition as well. Occupational hazard.
I agree with much of what you posted. I am an adjunct law professor and find that much of what I do is not looked at in the same manner as if I was a FT Prof.
I do also practice law FT and have been doing so for better than 22 years. The problem with lawyer scholarship and lawyer blogging is that lawyers are advocates. Therefore, you are less likely to get an objective read on the law from a practicing attorney.
Yeah, I know that law professors may not be objective either. Note, I used the word, “less likely.”
I agree, Mitchell. I don’t think all practicing lawyer blogs (or all posts of practicing lawyer blogs) necessarily bring something worthy to the table. I know that some of mine are more thoughtful than others, and some bring nothing of worth.
But there are many practicing lawyers who, in my view, have some more interesting and more real understanding of the impact of issues and decisions than anyone could appreciate who isn’t in the trenches. It’s interesting that the FT lawprofs treat the adjuncts as if they too are unworthy. It smells like defensiveness, which the FT adamently deny. How can they be special if anybody can think important thoughts?
If the concern was truly scholarship, then they would be less concerned with the source of ideas and more concerned with the quality. Besides, the lawprofs understanding of how law applies in the trenches is, well, limited and consequently often stereotypical. They might learn a thing or two from us trench lawyers, crude and unsophisticated as we may be.
Without venturing into the deep waters of this debate (about which I know little), I would simply add that the blog site maintained by the Federal Defenders in the 9th Circuit (http://circuit9.blogspot.com/) should satisy both the scholarly and the practical. Doug Berman has often noted their work on his blog. While this is a conversation worth having, hopefully it will produce more such quality work, and not just more to-ing and fro-ing about who’s right about legal blogging.
Dave:
It takes about 3 minutes to learn how to use an RSS feed and set it up. And it allows you to easily scan as many blogs as you want, without ever having to visit those sites.
So if you are looking for ideas, perhaps some that come out of the practical blogosphere of which I am a proud member, they are easily there to be found. It would seem logical that law profs would want to see how legal issues they discuss academically actually play out in the courtroom. And the practical blogosphere gives you a front row seat.
Scott…
In Britain… or at least that part where the Law of England wales does the business – we have a novel approach. We link to each other but our law blogs seem to have little or no law in them.