Walter Hutchens’ Blog

Recently I stumbled across the Law Talk Podcast. The most recent episode has a fantastic discussion between Nathan Oman, assistant professor at William & Mary’s law school, and Doug Berman, professor at the law school of Ohio State. They talk about how technology is influencing legal scholarship. They discuss how blogs, podcasts and services like SSRN interact with the traditional dead-tree (though now usually electronically accessed) modes of legal scholarship.

Berman has a very well-known blog on federal sentencing law. It has been cited by the US Supreme Court and been extremely useful to practitioners and members of the judiciary during recent periods of sentencing law upheaval. Drawing upon that experience, Berman also writes the blog Law School Innovation.

It was nice to hear two people living “inside” the current legal scholarship system talking about how its conventions are at least at the margins being affected by technological change.

I find the conventions of traditional legal scholarship—that one will write a 100+ page article, festooned with perhaps a thousand footnotes, which will then wait months for publication after being turned over to student editors, and will finally be read in its entirety by virtually no one—deadening. It’s just not the kind of stuff I am eager to read or write. (Alas, this hasn’t been a great stimulus to my academic career! Recently my enthusiasm even for blogging has lagged, too. That hasn’t been ideal, either. But I’m now employed at a teaching institution, so the prevailing modes of legal scholarship are, at least for now, largely immaterial to my own career).

The Law Talk podcast is available through Apple’s iTunes Music Store and here.