Faculty Blogs and Influence: Overview (Part 1)

I have just posted a paper on law faculty blogs, Of Empires, Independents, and Captives: Law Blogging, Law Scholarship, and Law School Rankings on SSRN.  To some degree, the paper is an update of anearlier version posted last summer that argued blogging was a cost effective mechanism for schools outside the top tier to improve notoriety and rankings in US News.

Despite caustic criticism from some (Brian Leiter comes to mind), law faculty blogs can fit nicely into a continuum of scholarship, a place to debate ideas that can become more traditional scholarship or a place to apply principles discussed in more traditional scholarship.  Nor most posts be short and merely descriptive.  This Blog, for example, routinely discusses matters over daily posts that can go on for a week or two.   

The paper explores the universe of law faculty blogs, including both the increased level of organization appearing on the blogosphere and the growing influence of law blogs.  The paper compares the strengths and weaknesses of participating in an Empire, writing for a Captive law school blog, or going Independent.  Among other things, Empire blogs may have a greater ability to offer financial incentives for most law faculty bloggers. 

In addition, the paper seeks to assess influence.  Relying on a list of about 130 law faculty blogs, an effort has been made to rank the blogs, particularly through reference to law review and court citations.  We will look at these numbers over the next several posts.  The numbers have been growing, something particularly interesting given that most law blogs do not appear in legal data bases, making the search function particularly difficult.    

Finally, as it did last summer, the paper studies the potential impact of law blogging on rankings.  The data demonstrates that faculty from the top 20 schools, while dominating SSRN download rankings, are largely absent from the blogosphere.  Most active bloggers at the top blogs are at schools outside the top tier of US News.  There is growing anecdotal evidence of a link between SSRN downloads and blogging.  All of this suggests that law schools outside the top tier can disproportionately benefit from a strong presence on the blogosphere. 

As a corporate governance blog, the Race to the Bottom is not typically involved in discussions on faculty practices.  Nonetheless, we will make an exception and post on the subject of law faculty blogging for much of the next week.  In obeisance to the purpose of this Blog, however, the posts will be in the afternoon, with the morning reserved for the traditional corporate governance post.  We will largely explore the subject of law faculty blog influence.  To the extent that there is disagreement with, or mistakes in, the data, please let us know.  Tomorrow we will look at law faculty blogs and law review citations.