Is the legal blogosphere having a revival?
Years ago now, Nick Barber argued that blogs were the way of the future for legal scholarship ― specifically, edited and institutionalised blogs, such the UK Constitutional Law Blog, where Professor Barber’s post was published. Individual blogs, Professor Barber argued, could not guarantee sufficient quality to keep up with the institutional competitors. At the time, I responded with a somewhat petulant post defending individual and small group blogs, of which, after all this is one, and promising to fight a rear-guard action on their behalf.
But I have to admit that, in the years since, it has often felt like a lonely effort and, worse, a rather feeble one on my part. My posts have become far rarer than they used to be, as I have been trying to keep up with teaching and marking responsibilities, and dealing with other things. I have gone from easily two if not three posts each week when I started to being glad if I do this many in a month. And I haven’t been alone. Paul Daly, at Administrative Law Matters is as good as ever, but I don’t thinnk he posts as often as he used to either. The Clawbies ― in name still the Canadian Law Blog Awards ― have long ago shed their blogging focus and reward all manner of publications, including social media posts. In the United States, the Volokh Conspiracy, which was a big inspiration for me when I started blogging, is much diminished from its heyday a dozen years ago, while another blog I used to read regularly, Concurring Opinions, disappeared altogether.
I can only speculate about why this happened, of course, beyond my own circumstances. But perhaps they are not so unique. Contrary to what Professor Barber hypothesized, I do not think the issue is competition on quality. Rather, as I said in my response to him, individual and small-group blogging requires an awful lot of commitment, or indeed fanaticism ― and, as it turns out, that is just very hard to sustain over the long term. Perhaps I, and others of that generaton of bloggers, have simply grown a bit, or more than a bit, tired. Be that as it may, I have been wondering whether the glory days of the individual and small group legal blog were in the past.
But just when I was least expecting it, a revival of legal blogging may be under way. It was foreshadowed by Mark Mancini with his indispensible Sunday Evening Administrative Review, which has been going strong for a couple of years now. But in just the last few months, there have been a number of new entrants into the legal/constitutional blogosphere. In Canada, there are Philippe Lagassé, with In Defence of Westminster, and Vanessa Macdonnell, with Clause-by-Clause. There is Emmett Macfarlane, too, with Defending Canadian Democracy, though as the name suggests, Professor Macfarlane is writing about politics too, as well as legal or constituional issues. And it’s not just Canada, either. In the United States, a new group blog, Divided Argument, has an all-star roster of contributors, including old Volokh hands Orin Kerr and William Baude. In France, Mathieu Carpentier has launched Matter, Forme, and Power, which I take it will have posts in both English and French.
All these cool kids (kids in blogging terms, that is!) are based on Substack, and perhaps the popularity and user-friendliness of that platform has helped encourage some or all of their founders. But I would argue that functionally “a substack” is just another blog ― a repository of texts, typically rather longer and more substantial than a socil media post but rather shorter and less deeply researched than a journal article, displayed from newest to oldest.
And so of course I am very pleased indeed at these developments, all the more so since there is so little else to be pleased about these days. I wonder if those two things are connected ― witness Professors Lagassé and Macfarlane both looking to defend things, and perhaps they are not the only ones of the new crop of bloggers trying to push back against everything falling to bits. Both because of and despite this, I hope everyone involved will keep up the enthusiasm ― or fanaticism! ― that this sort of blogging requires, and that the renewed legal blogosphere will thrive even if some of its older denizens get lazy (in my case) or overworked (in the others’). Maybe we will have to raise our game to keep up! Welcome, all, and enjoy yourselves!