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Beyond the Bluebook: The Future of Writing About the Law

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Oops, we forgot to post our write-up of the final panel of Friday’s conference at New York Law School.
Afternoon Panel (2:15-3:30): Beyond the Bluebook: The Future of Writing About the Law
“In a world increasingly dominated by blogs and online publications, does traditional legal scholarship have a future? Will legal scholars abandon the traditional law review to write for a popular audience, and if so, why? What will this brave new world look like?”
Panelists and Moderator:
* Bernard Hibbitts, Professor, University of Pittsburgh School of Law and Editor in Chief of Jurist.
* Rosa Brooks, Professor, Georgetown University Law Center and op-ed columnist, Los Angeles Times.
* Jack Balkin, Professor, Yale Law School and Founder and Director of the Information Society Project.
* Lawrence B. Solum, Professor, University of Illinois College of Law and author of Legal Theory Blog.
* Rodger Citron (Moderator), Assistant Professor of Law, Touro Law Center.
For those of you who are interested — which, we realize, is probably a small, wonky group — a brief discussion appears after the jump.


Three great buzzwords from Professor Balkin, about how the blogosphere is affecting discourse and the flow of information:

— “diffusion”

— “democratization”

— “acceleration” (of the news cycle)

For more thoughts on the subject, check out Professor Balkin’s great post at Balkinization. It’s tremendously insightful and thorough; we can’t recommend it highly enough.
(Yes, we’re biased — it includes a shout-out to ATL.)
Near the end of the panel, an amusing exchange ensued on the future of legal academia and blogging:

Professor Larry Solum: “What’s going to win out is a hybrid of SSRN and MySpace…”

Professor Balkin: “Can you log onto GoDaddy right now and buy the domain name Mylawbuddies.com?”

Rosa Brooks: “Yeah. Let’s make the legal academy even more like high school.”

Finally, here’s a fun little blind item from Rosa Brooks. She described a friend of hers who, in his pre-tenure days, printed out his articles to be discussed at legal faculty workshops in 10- rather than 12-point font. He did this because he thought the smaller font made him look more “serious.” And he did get tenure (although he did have “many other things going for him,” Professor Brooks noted).

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