Balkinization: Citation Counts to Balkinization in Law Reviews (and what this says about changes in legal scholarship)

Comments:

Predictions of revolution in these arenas always provoke a skeptical response from me. This characterization of the relationship of blog posts to legal scholarship fails to recognize a deeper tradition of unorthodox sorts of media and genres and their assimilation "into a pre-existing economy of accreditation and salience." I'm thinking, for example, of Rule 17 in the Bluebook, which addresses unpublished materials, including among other sources press releases, interviews, and speeches. It would be worth examining when references to these sources achieved a salience warranting their inclusion in the citation style rules, too. Assuming they have appeared in several editions, I think this post implies a mistaken assumption that legal scholarship is especially rigorously monitored for creditable sources, along the lines of published law review articles, other disciplines' standard forms of publication, and so forth. In fact, the literature probably includes a wide range of sources.

# posted by

Dean C. Rowan : 8:57 PM

Jack,

To confirm your point, one of my Balkinization posts is being reprinted in a forthcoming jurisprudence text. I was surprised when notified of this, but it makes sense. Serious posts contain useful information.

Brian

# posted by

Brian Tamanaha : 10:39 PM

I like to call blogs the "tertiary" source of legal scholarship. But maybe that's just my Masonomics opensource bias!

# posted by

Unknown : 11:29 AM

Prof. Tamanaha:

To confirm your point, one of my Balkinization posts is being reprinted in a forthcoming jurisprudence text. I was surprised when notified of this, but it makes sense. Serious posts contain useful information.

Guess I don't have that bragging right, but I did get this interesting (but unconfirmed) nugget a while back:

Are you aware that one of your old posts [here] is being used to torture Loyola Law School (Los Angeles) students? It is part of the material they must use to write a paper for the competition to join law the school's Law Review. They can cite your post from 2005 about "exigent circumstances" for warrantless searches.

Never got more specifics ... and I'm not sure whether this was to laud my "scholarship" or to cut it to ribbons.... ;-)

Now if I can get UC/Yale/Hahvahd....

Cheers,

# posted by

Arne Langsetmo : 1:13 PM

Arne,

Congrats!

Brian

# posted by

Brian Tamanaha : 7:45 PM

I'm currently editing an article for the New York City Law Review (CUNY Law) that cites a post from your blog.

# posted by

Unknown : 11:50 PM

You folks fail to recognize that the biggest problem concerning authoritative citation of blogs is the arbitrary censorship of comments and commenters. It is actually the comment sections that make blogs attractive as references by helping to present a variety of views and helping to make the blogs self-correcting on the facts. Blogs where visitors' comments are arbitrarily censored have no credibility.

There is absolutely no reason why a blog post and its comment section should look like a peer-reviewed paper in a scholarly journal. They are completely different media.

And if you think that this arbitrary censorship does not go on all the time, you are very naive. For example, the Law X.0 blog (formerly Law Blog Metrics), a member of the Law Professor Blogs Network, refuses to post any of my comments, even though my comment submissions there have always been on-topic, serious, and polite. That this kind of censorship is condoned in the law blogosphere is a reflection of the abysmal ethical standards of the law profession.

Larry Fafarman
Association of Non-Censoring Bloggers.

# posted by

Larry Fafarman : 11:50 PM

>>>>>>I'm hoping that some enterprising scholar will do a study of citation practices to a selection of 20 or so well known legal blogs to see if the citation patterns for these two blogs reflect a general trend. (Perhaps it's already been done-- please let me know in the comments.) <<<<<<

This fairly old article (dated Aug. 16, 2006) shows that several other blogs have experienced rapid growth in citations in law journals:

The legal blogs with the most citations are:

Sentencing Law and Policy (78)
The Volokh Conspiracy (62)
Balkinization (32)
SCOTUS Blog (32)
How Appealing (30)
Legal Theory Blog (30)
Lessig Blog (21)
Patently-O: Patent Law Blog (17)
ProfessorBainbridge.com (16)
The Becker-Posner Blog (12)
Leiter Reports (10)
White Collar Crime Prof Blog (10)

The legal blogs with the greatest overall increase in citations are:

The Volokh Conspiracy (+ 21)
Balkinization (+ 18)
Sentencing Law and Policy (+ 18)
Patently-O: Patent Law Blog (+ 13)
SCOTUS Blog (+ 13)
How Appealing (+ 11)

These big growths in numbers are relative to another list that was only four months old (April 19, 2006), though of course that doesn't necessarily mean that all of those extra citations were published during that four month period, though presumably many were.

Your own data showing 49 cites of Balkinization in 2007 alone shows that the above data is badly out-of-date.

Also, this other fairly old article (dated Aug. 6, 2006) has data on blog citations by court opinions.

# posted by

Larry Fafarman : 8:04 AM

My student note, hopefully being published in May 2008, has a cite to Balkinization. So if all goes well, you may get a "plus one" in 2008.

My cite is just as a preliminary point of reference to the general academic discussion about my note case at the time it came down.

# posted by

Brendan McNamara : 7:34 PM

I think this post implies a mistaken assumption that legal scholarship is especially rigorously monitored for creditable sources, along the lines of published law review articles.
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# posted by

Unknown : 5:27 AM

That this kind of censorship is condoned in the law blogosphere is a reflection of the abysmal ethical standards of the law profession.
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