Belle Lettre has another fine post, which play's off Ian Best's update of his list of judicial opinions that cite blogs. I wanted to react to just one the many interesting things she has to say:
[T]here is, or at least there should be, less of a schism between the more "traditional" legal academy (MTLA) and the new "public intellectual" legal academy (PILA). It is good to discover that in the act of writing to a larger audience, there can also be a deeper impact It is good to discover that being a "public intellectual" does not diminish "serious" scholarly authority. It is good that one need can write for two types of audiences and have two types of impacts that do not mutually exclude one another.
I am of two minds about statements like this. I want to believe that serious scholarship can be compatible with public intellectual engagement. But I am not so sure. As Best's survey reveals, most judicial citations to blogs are to one blog--Sentencing Law and Policy--and the citations are to what I would consider traditional legal scholarship in the doctrinal mode. Just because it's a blog doesn't mean it's PILA. Blogs are the medium not the message; the vessel, not the content.
And there are real tensions between blogging for public consumption and scholarship. If I might be allowed a controversial assertion, I simply don't believe that it is always the case that a serious idea can be translated into a sound bite, an op/ed, or a 200 word blog post. This isn't to deny that it is sometimes possible to bridge the gap between the world of serious ideas and the world of public political debate. Not just sometimes, frequently, often, lots of the time. But reaching for the broad audience creates a set of temptations, distractions, extrinsic rewards. Blogging for wide public consumption can focus the mind on hit counts, mentions in the media, and all the rest.
One of the nice things about the blogosphere is the importance of the "long tail." Sure, we think of the "big blogs" with the amazing daily hit counts, but in many ways, the important impact of blogs comes from hundreds and thousands of blogs in the "long tail". Doug Berman's blog is a wonderful example. It's narrow-casting, not broadcasting. But on its topic and for its audience, a Doug Berman post can be doctrinal scholarship at its best.
More on this topic by Davod Schraub at The Debate Link. Here's a taste:
Certainly, the idea that certain topics are too complex to be distilled down to soundbites is one I concur with (and have ranted on before). And I'd like to think that this blog deals with complex subjects in an appropriate and sophisticated manner. However, one of the key advantages of blogging is that the norms of the medium differ significantly from academic scholarship. I write in a much more relaxed and casual manner on a blog than I do when writing an official research paper. Being introduced to a subject through the lens of a jargon-laden 60 page article with 500 footnotes is very intimidating. But there is pressure, I believe, to write in a suitably dense form if one is writing for academia. One would not expect an article in a reputable scholarly journal to look like an elongated blog post. And, with some exceptions, most blog posts do not look like bite-sized law review articles. Presumably, this form might make some difficult topics more accessible to the general public than was previously possible.
