Leiter on blogs

Brian Leiter has this essay, "Why Blogs Are Bad for Legal Scholarship," at the Yale Law Journal's "Pocket Part."  He writes, among other things:

Blogs differ from other Internet services because they combine three characteristics: they are unmediated (like so much of what is on the Internet), public (like SSRN), and normative (like much e-mail about scholarly topics). It is this conjunction that makes blogs special, and especially dangerous—at least for legal scholarship. (Philosophy, my other academic field, is less vulnerable on this score, for reasons I’ll return to in a moment.) Any second-rate scholar can have an opinion, however ignorant or confused, about the merits of someone’s work, and express that opinion in an e-mail to a colleague elsewhere. Now imagine that same ignorant or confused opinion broadcast to thousands: that is what blogs make possible. Indeed, blogs do more than that: they make possible the repeated and systematic broadcast of non-expert opinions, opinions that can then be picked up and amplified by other non-expert blogs. The result is often what Timur Kuran and Cass Sunstein would call an “availability cascade[.]" . . .

Unlike philosophy blogs, law blogs are susceptible to availability cascades, and for two reasons. One reason is that the legal academy often lacks expert mediators. To be sure, there are plenty of experts who read law blogs and who can tell right away when the half-baked tripe of Generic Law Blog’s good friend is being passed off as a “significant” contribution. The problem is that reputational effects in the legal academy are mediated by two institutions whose primary arbiters are not, themselves, experts or even quasi-experts, and so are especially vulnerable to availability cascades. First, one of the major venues for legal scholarship remains the student-edited law reviews, and the student editors of these journals are only irregularly and by happenstance in a position to offer expert resistance to an availability cascade initiated by the law blogs. Second, the legal academy, because of the enormous public interest in law, is more susceptible to the journalistic reception of legal ideas, and journalists are, with rare exceptions, not experts. Even those journalists who regularly cover law tend to be especially susceptible to what apparently more expert law professors with blogs have to say. With scholarly discourse in law hostage, at least partly, to these two non-expert mediating devices, the potential for availability cascades to lead to the dissemination of weak scholarship is high.

Of course, there is another culprit in this story, namely, the blogs themselves. If the leading law blogs were written only by the leading scholars, the availability cascades that occur would be more likely to raise, rather than lower, the level of scholarly discussion. But that is, unsurprisingly, not the case. The most visible and highly trafficked law-related blogs have one, and only one, thing in common: they were started relatively early in the “blog boom,” that is, in 2001 or 2002. (Many, but not all, also tilt noticeably to the right.) Latecomers, like the Becker-Posner Blog or the University of Chicago Law Faculty Blog, which generally have much higher intellectual content, get nothing like the traffic of the early arrivals. As the economists like to say, the “barriers to entry” to the Internet in general, and the “blogosphere” in particular, are low, and not just in monetary terms. One need not be a good scholar, or an intellectual heavyweight, to have a blog, and if one got into the blog game early enough, one can thrive, especially with an audience of non-expert consumers. . . .

People who run blogs tend to respond badly, indeed harshly, to the suggestion that blogs are not as important as their proprietors think they are. Be that as it may, my sense is that blogs have been bad for legal scholarship, leading to increased visibility for mediocre scholars and half-baked ideas and to a dumbing down of standards and judgments.

Two mechanisms still exist for counteracting these developments. First, more first-rate scholars may enter the blogosphere, and use their pre-Internet gravitas to shift the terms of discussion. Second, the shift to peer-refereed publications in the legal academy—most of the best work in law and economics and law and philosophy, for example, now appears in faculty-edited journals—will ameliorate the significance of availability cascades on non-expert mediators like students and journalists.

I suppose I disagree -- I'd have to, wouldn't I? -- with Professor Leiter about the extent to which law-prof-bloggers are more ignorant or overrated than other academic bloggers.  Still, the piece provides reasons for caution and care. 

I would have thought the real reason blogs are bad for scholarship is because they are so delightfully time-sucking.