A Blogger's Tale
- I'm blogging from the bloggership conference, hosted by the Berkman Center, at Harvard Law School. Paul Caron is introducing me now--at about 8:30 a.m. EDST. I thought this might be a nice occasion to share the following with the reader's of Legal Theory Blog
In September of 2002, I started a blog. On a whim. I barely knew what a blog was, and I certainly didn’t know what to do with one. Like a lot of bloggers, at first I didn’t even know that the word “blog” was short for weblog. And I had no clue as to what a web log was—beyond the obvious, that is was some kind of “log” on the world wide “web.” To be candid, I had started to notice the word “blog” popping up in “cool” venues, and I hated the idea that I was already “behind the curve.” So, I looked at a few blogs. I don’t remember which ones, but I began to understand that a blog consisted of “posts” or entries that formed a kind of online diary or journal. I got the sense that blogs could be about almost anything—serious, frivolous, political, cultural, personal. Whatever. I posted some posts, got busy with other things, and let the blog lie dormant until January of 2003, when I started to post again on a regular basis.
I called the blog “Legal Theory Blog.” I knew that other law professors had blogs—I think that I knew about the Volokh Conspiracy, a group blog organized by Eugene Volokh of the University of California at Los Angeles Law School and I might have been aware of “Instapundit,” a solo effort by Glenn Reynolds of the University of Tennessee Law School. I had a certain idea about what the blog might accomplish, based on something else that I was just beginning to use extensively as a research tool—the Social Science Citation Network, a website and service that provides access on the Internet to scholarly papers in a variety of disciplines including law. I wanted to do a blog with a focus on “legal theory” broadly conceived as encompassing a variety of interdisciplinary approaches to normative and positive legal scholarship. What a geek.
I thought to myself: “I’m reading these papers on SSRN in draft. I could blog about some of the papers that I read.” It seemed to me that there might be half a dozen potential readers, who would be interested in my postings about legal theory papers. Secretly, I hope that if the blog were a giant success it might attract a few dozen readers on a semi-regular basis. And I said to myself, “What the hell, if no one reads it, I’ll just stop doing it.” As I recall, my expectations were rather low: I believed that it was “too late” for entry into the blogging market—which was already dominated by a few “big blogs.”
Were it not for some positive feedback, I’m almost sure my career as a blogger would have ended a few weeks into my second foray. At first the feedback came in tiny dribs and drabs. I can actually name the two people who are most responsible for the continued existence of “Legal Theory Blog.” Chris Bertram and Nathan Oman had blogs of their own at the time. Chris Bertram is a philosopher at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom—he had a blog called “Junius” and he later became a founding member of a widely read mostly academic group blog called “Crooked Timber.” I don’t remember exactly what Bertram said or why, but whatever it was, it made me think that what I was doing might be appreciated by thoughtful readers. Nate Oman recently became a law professor at the College of William and Mary in Virginia. At the time, Oman was a first year law student at Harvard with a blog called “A Good Oman,” and like Bertram, Oman provided thoughtful and appreciative feedback. Bertram and Oman opened my eyes to the blogosphere as a distinctive form of social and intellectual interaction—a space for communicating about serious ideas. Thanks guys.
And then something else happened. I read an op/ed in the New York Times about a judicial nominee. The editorial focused on a case involving the application of the doctrine of res judicata (claim preclusion) to a case involving the tort of spoliation (destruction) of evidence. Well, I’ve written a treatise with a chapter on claim preclusion and another treatise with a chapter on the spoliation tort. So I read the case. And it struck me that the editorial was a hatchet job or incompetent or both. So I blogged about the editorial. And then the blogosphere took over—producing dozens and dozens of “links” to my post and thousands and thousands of “visits” to Legal Theory Blog.
This really wasn’t the kind of attention I was looking for. I get no kicks from TV—especially being on it. But there was a lesson in my fifteen minutes of fame—an illustration of the awesome power of the Internet for rapid dissemination of information. Within a few weeks, Legal Theory Blog had hundreds of regular readers. When the readership began to climb into the thousands, I realized that an obsession with readership was adding to the not inconsiderable burden of getting out the blog on a daily basis. I stopped counting.
I learned another lesson about the power of the blogosphere from a series of exchanges with Jack Balkin, who then ran Balkinization as a solo blog. In response to a column by Eddie Lazarus I posted a detailed reply, prompting Jack Balkin to publish a post entitled “Good Judging and ‘Following the Rules Laid Down.’” I countered with “A Neoformalist Manifesto,” followed by Balkin’s “Good Judging and "Following the Rules Laid Down," Part II.” The exchange ended with my “Fear and Loathing in New Haven.” The exchange conducted over the course of four days, runs almost fourteen-thousand words. Balkin’s contributions to the exchange were eloquent and powerful. They gave me the sense that the possibilities of blogging transcended the one-paragraph post; Balkin’s blogging blurred the lines between conventional legal scholarship and bloggership.
Eventually, Legal Theory Blog evolved a fairly standard format. Lot’s of the content consists of links to new papers on SSRN and elsewhere. Every week, there is a “Download of the Week” which frequently ends with the tag line: download it while its hot! Another weekly feature is a book recommendation—called the “Legal Theory Bookworm.” Many law schools, post open-access versions of workshop papers on the web—Legal Theory Blog links to those in a weekly “Legal Theory Calendar,” which is reposted day-by-day, Monday through Friday. Once a week, I post an entry in the Legal Theory Lexicon, which covers topics like “The Coase Theorem,” “Ex Post and Ex Ante,” and so forth.
If you scroll up, you'll find a link to the Webcast. Check it out!
