The Harvard Law Review starting a blog is an important moment. Law reviews have been crawling in this direction — toward shorter, somewhat less-heavily footnoted, somewhat less-heavily edited, more timely, and more relevant forms of writing — for a while. The Harvard Law Review, like many journals, has an “online only” component of shorter essays, the Forum, which usually consists of commentaries on larger articles from the Review itself. But many of these online-only efforts (including the Harvard Law Review’s) are just shorter versions of what appears in the reviews themselves — heavily footnoted, heavily edited, still-pretty-long legal commentary that takes many months to produce. Some journals have gone further, to be sure. The Yale Journal on Regulation’s Notice and Comment blog, done in conjunction with the ABA Section of Administrative Law and Regulatory Practice, is a genuine bloggy format of intelligent, relatively short, footnote-free, topical analysis.
Why try a blog? There are lots of good reasons, including:
- There is a place for long theoretical or doctrinal articles on legal topics, in which arguments are worked out in careful detail with supporting citations. But the format is limiting. The vast majority of law review articles are rarely read and are not of interest to a general law reader. With law itself so sprawling and specialized, it is hard for a general interest reader to care about what a law review produces in the aggregate. And the ratio of insights to words, and insights to authorial and editorial hours invested, is usually very low in the traditional law review format.
- Indeed, a general law review like the Harvard Law Review is a peculiar form that actually has a very small if any regular readership market. People read individual law review articles, but when was the last time you browsed an entire issue of a law review? If the answer to that is embarrassing to the form, you are not alone. Most people read law review articles by grabbing them off of SSRN or finding them through some search. The law review itself functions for the reader as a branding mechanism. Contrast that with a publication you actually read regularly and fully. Law reviews exist today in large part because legal academics need a place to publish long articles and because students need credentialing and perhaps editorial and Bluebook training. They do not exist because people actually want to read them. They are the ultimate supply-side driven publication.
- Blogs are different. Yes, some of them are vanity presses, produced without reference to readership. But some of them have big readerships which the form actually serves — that is, they can be demand-side driven venues for legal scholarship. There are a few reasons for this:
- Blogs can be more timely.
- Blogs foster better debates because they force debaters to get to the essence of an argument and allow quick back and forths.
- Blogs place a premium on clear, vivid, accessible writing.
- Blogs are not, as they are often dismissed to be, shallow. Of course they can be, just as an 80-page article can be. But to write well in this format, one must be expert enough to articulate the heart of an argument quickly and persuasively. That is not easy.
So we applaud the experiment with a blog, and have a few words of friendly advice about how to succeed.
- Start with a radical question for a law review: Who is your readership, and why does it need you? Then ask: What distinctive service are you providing that would lead someone to read your blog in an already glutted media environment? Keep the audience and the service in mind in selecting authors and topics (and in exercising editorial control). Keep asking these questions and keep adapting the site as the answers change. The more focused you stay on answering these questions, the more effective the site will be.
- Relax about footnotes and citational authority — and about editorial control generally. You can and should copy edit and offer suggestions in a timely fashion. But you have to get over the idea that you are responsible for the “accuracy” of everything the author says. Invite responsible authors and place the responsibility for their work on them. (If it makes you feel better, put this point in your blog mission statement.) Errors will happen, and that is OK: The market of criticism and analysis will catch the errors; and a great thing about a bloggy format is that an author can quickly fix an error, and note the change, after publication. But ex ante obsession with accuracy requires rounds of nit-picky edits that often don’t add to quality, and that sometimes, in insisting on a faux precision, detract from it.
- Be useful. Academics are sometimes contemptuous of mere doctrine, and sometimes more of mere information. But doctrine and information, and supporting documents, can be very useful. The sites that are best at generating big ideas are generally not the ones that eschew everything else. Big ideas are made up of smaller ideas — which are the little bricks out of which the housing gets built. Doing small ideas well and often, iteratively, and in a fashion that is useful, will build an environment in which big ideas can germinate. That is one thing blogs can be good at.
- Get an argument going. As noted, blogs are great formats for fleshing out various sides of an argument efficiently. If you use your valuable online real estate to choose great topics and authors, the eyeballs will come.