Balkin on Blogs
posted by Frank Pasquale
The Yale Law Report has a nice interview with Jack Balkin on the new role of blogs in legal scholarship:
Blogging changes the relationship between law professors and their audiences because professors can reach more people. It changes the relationship between law professors and journalists because law professors don’t need journalists to get their ideas out to the broader public; conversely, blogging makes it easier for journalists to find the right experts to interview. It changes the timing and pace of legal scholarship because law professors can talk about cases the day they come down, driving the discussion forward in a very short time rather than through a series of law review articles that may take years to appear. Just as the Internet collapses the news cycle, it also collapses the publication and discussion cycle. It produces a type of legal writing that is more journalistic, more personal, and more driven by current events.
Reminds me a bit of the view of the more forward-thinking teacher in The History Boys. I tend to agree, but I think any blogger who presumes to be an expert has to have some “street cred” on the topic before they get taken seriously….and traditional legal scholarship is a good way to earn that “expertise capital” (which can then be “spent” on blogging). On the other hand, the wonders of hyperlinking can make a good blog post more persuasive than some scholarship: bloggers “cite to supporting information or authorities by linking to them, so that you can see the evidence for yourself.” No more waiting weeks for the interlibrary loan to deliver you the critical document in opponents’ argument; you can pick it apart yourself and see whether it really supports their ideas.
Balkin also focuses on some egalitarian aspects of the new media; for example,
The blogosphere allows people to advertise their expertise by showing what they can do; they put their views out there for everyone to see. . . . This not only makes it easier for journalists to find expert opinion, but it allows expert opinion to route around traditional media gatekeepers and reach the public directly. Several sites have sprung up that help people do this. Memeorandum collects links to major news stories and matches them with links to prominent blogs that cover those stories and comment on them.
And finally, an interesting set of predictions for the future:
In the legal academy, you will get an increasing integration between blogs and legal scholarship, between blogs and what you read in law reviews. As I mentioned, law reviews are already experimenting with blogs as adjuncts to their online presence. There will be more connections between blogs and SSRN and other online publications. More and more legal scholarship will occur in blog formats, or link to blogs, or cite to blogs, and the distinctions between blogging and other forms of legal scholarship will begin to blur, even if some important differences remain. As this happens, you’ll see the public persona of law professors migrate to their blogs.
Though I’m usually allergic to meta-culture (blogging on blogging, movies about filmmakers, etc), this interview is well worth reading.
February 17, 2007 at 3:48 pm
Posted in: Blogging
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Responses (5)
Seth R. - February 17, 2007 at 6:35 pm
I think your point about how a writer needs “street cred” to be taken seriously is still true. But not for much longer.
This is a natural conclusion of the direction the information age is taking. Increasingly, people simply don’t care about the resume of the writer. Anonymous contributors are everywhere in the blogosphere, and the readership is learning to focus more on the message than the messenger.
A case in point came from a blog post I read recently about how a respected member of Time Magazines editorial staff put out a blog post prior to Pres. Bush’s State of the Union speech making some predictions and analyzing the situation. The post hadn’t been up more than a few minutes before there began a relentless barrage of critical anonymous response posts, first correcting blatant factual errors, then attacking the substance. By the end of the episode, the article’s credibility was in ruins.
Look at Wikipedia. Very difficult to check the credibility or reputation of the source (which is why you, rightly, can’t cite to it in polite society). Yet the website has a huge amount of believability with the readers. I check it regularly and have learned a great deal from it.
On the internet, you live or die by your content, because everything is so fleeting that, honestly, no one cares if you graduated from Harvard and clerked for so and so, or whatever else.
The only use credentials have is insofar as they provided you with the skills to deliver good content. I predict that in 20 years, we’ll have both the skills/tools and attitude that will allow us not to care who wrote what. All that will matter is the information.
Patrick S. O'Donnell - February 17, 2007 at 7:02 pm
Re: ‘All that will matter is the information.’
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
T.S. Eliot, “The Rock”, Faber & Faber 1934.
With regard to some very important kinds of knowledge, ‘knowing THAT’ is revealed by and exemplified through a ‘knowing HOW,’ in which case there remains an ineluctable connection between what is said and who is saying it, betraying an organic link between thought, word and deed. This is especially, but perhaps not exclusively the case with nonpropositional knowledge, evidenced rather eloquently in Plato’s Socratic dialogues.
Seth R. - February 17, 2007 at 11:39 pm
Lest my post sound too much like sour grapes, I’d hasten to add that I do think the traditional avenues of academic acheivement tend to result in “better content.”
Frank - February 18, 2007 at 10:09 pm
A quick note to Patrick: Have you seen Balkin’s Cultural Software? Some of the theory addresses that knowing how/knowing that distinction.
Also, along those lines, Larissa MacFarquhar has a pretty amazing profile of the Churchlands:
http://www.portifex.com/BSPages/FridayFronts/H0209.htm
Patrick S. O'Donnell - February 18, 2007 at 11:47 pm
Frank,
My comments were in response to those of Seth R., not your original post, so, keeping that in mind:
I know nothing whatsoever about Balkin’s ‘Cultural Software,’ but as I understand the knowing how/that distinction there is no way, in principle or practice, any sort of software can exemplify the distinction: only human beings, in an interpersonal context, in the living of their lives, can provide the sort of modeling that is being referred to here. Only a human being can, for instance, exemplify or instantiate courage. Only human beings can emulate for others the virtues (Greek, Christian, Buddhist…) as settled dispositions to act in a certain way…no software is capable of such acting. Software of any sort is irrelevant to the following: Cultivating a virtuous disposition entails habituating our emotions in particular ways as well as the exercise of practical reasoning (deliberative judgment, phronēsis) so as to learn how and why to act the right way in any given situation, as well as, more broadly, conduct our lives in such a way as to reveal our dedication to (the fundamental value of) the Good. Developmentally speaking, the virtuous person comes to learn how to intuitively and spontaneously respond to the moral dimensions of any circumstance or situation: ‘The better I get at deliberating and working out what to do, the less I will need to deliberate, for the more obvious it will become to me what the morally salient features of the situation in front of me are’ (Julia Annas). The knowledge of virtue is bound up with self-knowledge, and such knowledge effaces the boundaries between subject and object (for instance, one cannot communicate one’s self-knowledge to others). The knowledge of good (and evil) is directed more to the ‘how’ of knowing than the ‘that:’ knowledge of the good means knowing how to be good (or how to do things well). As Francisco J. Gonzalez explains, the knowledge associated with the virtues and the Good is (1) a knowledge how (exemplified by Socrates himself in the course of a dialogue), (2) a self-knowledge insofar as it is ineluctably tied to the virtuous agent herself, and (3) non-propositional knowledge (hence the aporias, the Socratic method, and the philosopher’s ascent out of the Cave to a vision of the Agathon). Nonetheless, words, images (as allegories, metaphors, analogies, etc.) and propositions are dialectically essential to the dialogic process of evoking, remembering, or awakening that enables one to recognize, in some measure, that with which the soul has had prior acquaintance. In terms of the Platonic Cave allegory, the Good is the true cause of knowing and being known, and the knowledge of the Good is decidedly non-propositional. For example, our knowledge of beauty itself, as a ‘form’ or ‘idea,’ depends on illumination of the Good (the Sun) in the very way that our perception of beautiful sensible objects (as partial or instantiations or realizations of “beauty”) depends on the illumination of the sun. The Platonic ‘form’ of beauty is the ideal that all objects christened ‘beautiful’ must approximate or instantiate. Similarly, ‘we can know what a virtue is without reducing it to its imperfect and contingent instances only because our understanding of the good allows us to idealize’ (Gonzalez). Knowledge, on this account, is not simply or solely knowledge of how things are, but presupposes a desire to know how things (by nature) should be. Doxa, opinion or belief, does not become epistēmē or knowledge through syllogistic proofs or deductive justification (for the Good remains outside any system of deductive knowledge), as the former already presupposes the latter, its epistemic status owing to the fact that it is an implicit awareness of the (idealized) ‘form,’ albeit restricted to its incomplete instantiation or partial realization. Through dialectical ascent to the Good we learn to distinguish belief from true knowledge, to properly distinguish the ‘form’ from its instantiations, in Aristotelian terms, to distinguish the contingent from the necessary. ‘The soul can seek to understand what virtue is only because it already “divines” this in the words, propositions and images with which it deals’ (Gonzalez). So propositions are used in dialectic to attain an insight that transcends them (the Good, after all, is transcendent), an insight into that nature which they themselves presuppose but cannot adequately or definitively express. This insight is on the order of a ‘knowledge by acquaintance’ (not in the Russellian sense) but is more than that inasmuch as the virtuous individual exemplifies the proper praxis of a ‘knowing how,’ having artfully woven together insight, reason, and right living.
Plato is an objective idealist, for it is as a result of our insight into and reflection upon noumenal realities outside the Cave that we are able to properly re-order the concrete and phenomenal world of the political realm with that which is true and just, with that which is Good, thereby bringing the soul of man into proper harmony and proportion with the polis of men, and both in alignment with the macrocosm. The objective nature of morality assumes the integrity and intelligibility of a cosmic order permitting subjective views of the Good articulated by individuals capable of indefinite growth or perfectibility, relative views and formulations of the Good that are consciously distinguished from but inspired by absolute (non-propositional) truth and goodness (the Agathon).
I read the profile of the Churchlands and I don’t see how it in any way pertains to the above. Perhaps you can elaborate or explain. I certainly came away from the article no less convinced that their philosophical work, such as it is (i.e., insofar as it is distinguishable from science), remains deeply mistaken….
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