How language sausages are made
Like so many other older scholars, until fairly recently I had
mistakenly thought that blogs were things written by teenagers to
communicate with other teenagers. Then one day when my friend, John
Lawler, was visiting us here in Montana, he introduced me to Language
Log. I loved it, of course, and was thrilled when a few months
ago Geoffrey Pullum invited me to post with this group.
Although my enlightenment is increasing, I was surprised at what I learned when I read "Law-Related Blogging Starting to See a Coming of Age" in the August 1, 2006 Chicago Lawyer, written by Douglas A. Berman, a law professor at Ohio State University's Moritz College of Law (see here). What surprised me was that Berman has published over 50 law review articles and commentaries and he estimates that these have been cited only about a half-dozen times in judicial opinions. In contrast, his Sentencing Law & Policy Blog (here) has been cited in more than a dozen cases. He reports:
My
blog is my most-cited work, by far. Certainly, it is more widely read
than any of my scholarship ... It's all part of the power of the blog
... Blogs help make the legal world move a lot faster. Within a matter
of minutes, I can take a new legal development, make it available to
the world, and comment on it quickly.
Law-related blogs began only about six years ago. Since then they
have caught fire, with over 1,300 of them now up and running. One of
Berman's law students even got academic credit for maintaining his own
blog. And a law professor claims that he obtained his position at
Boston University's school of law because of his blog.
Two of the many things lawyers like about their blogs is that they make
their field more collaborative and they level the playing field by
increasing interaction between the well-known legal academics and
judges and the less well-known law practitioners. One of the
latter, whose blog is named Ernie the Attorney, calls blogging a
"coffee table discussion" on a range of topics:
The
big word here is transparency. It's better to let people see how
sausages are made, what's going on.
As Language Log readers know by now, we try very hard to help people see how language sausages are made.
Posted by Roger Shuy at August 2, 2006 06:10 PM