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April 28, 2006
A Discussion About Law Professor Blogging
If I were there, I would certainly talk about my efforts (along with Greg Robinson), on this blog and as a guest-blogger at the Volokh Conspiracy, to enage in a real-time review of Michelle Malkin's 2004 book "In Defense of Internment: The Case for 'Racial Profiling' in World War II and the War on Terror."
The posts constituting the review are gathered here.
In a world without blogging, scholars would simply be unable to counter this sort of shoddily researched and poorly reasoned work -- work that, because of the high public profile of its author, can transform public debate on crucial subjects. In a world without blogging, a scholar would have to content himself either with the usually vain hope that a major newspaper might pick up a short op/ed or with a more comprehensive review published months or even years later in an academic journal that few people read.
To be sure, real-time book reviewing--whatever its attractiveness as a blogging enterprise--is an imperfect scholarly enterprise. Some of my arguments about her book were stronger than others, and if I had been writing a book review in a conventional way, I'm sure I would have sifted out some things and re-ordered others. On balance, though, I think the immediacy and broad reach of Greg's and my evaluation of Malkin's book more than outweighed any lack of polish.
UPDATE: I'm still listening to the webcast, although I had to turn the volume down slightly after Orin Kerr finished speaking for fear that the thunderous applause might break my laptop's little speaker.
Here's the thing that's striking me most of all: it surely says something important -- I'm not sure what, but something -- that thus far in the program, the thing that keeps coming up over and over again is the reaction of lawprof bloggers to an analogy (of lawprof blogging to water-cooler conversation) that was put forward at the conference by a law professor who is not herself a blogger.
Does this suggest that we lawprof bloggers are more worried about what our colleagues think of our blogging than we like to pretend we are?
Posted by Eric at April 28, 2006 9:27 AM