Blogs are Bad for Scholarship?
While much is made of the importance of blogging for today's lawyers, here is a sobering note in counterpoint.
Brian Leiter, Why Blogs Are Bad for Legal Scholarship, 116 Yale L.J. Pocket Part 53 (2006), http://www.thepocketpart.org/2006/09/20/leiter.html.
Excerpt:
"Blogs, like markets, are hostage to the ignorance and irrationality of their most visible proprietors, as well as to that of their readers, and the costs of those cognitive limitations are greatest when blogs purport to critique serious scholarship, a task in which the ability to sort wheat from chaff often turns on intellectual skills that are not widely distributed, even among academics. My guess is that Judge Posner has not, understandably, spent much time actually reading the blogs that are out there. I have seen relatively little evidence of correction and refinement of ideas, facts, and scholarship, much more amplification and repetition of existing prejudices and ignorance, or, occasionally, feeding frenzies on trivial mistakes in the mainstream media. "
