Scholarship, Blogging and Trade-Offs: On Discovering, Disseminating, and Doing

Abstract

Sometimes, when I'm in the middle of a heavy blogging spurt, I ask myself: Shouldn't I be spending this time writing law review articles instead?

But maybe, when I'm in the middle of writing a law review article, I should ask myself: Shouldn't I be spending this time blogging instead? My blog gets about 20,000 unique visitors a day; I don't know how many people read my articles, but I'm pretty sure it's very far from 20,000.

True, the article readers are presumably more likely to be the ones we want to influence with what we write. But how much more likely? Just how much influence do our law review articles actually get? Given this uncertainty, and the suspicion that a typical law review article's influence is far from vast, just how much should we value our "traditional scholarship", and what fraction of our years should we devote to it? These are not rhetorical questions; I honestly want to know the answer, and I suspect many other academic bloggers do, too.

This short article briefly discusses these questions, and also asks how our blogging can advance our scholarship rather than just being a rival use of our time.