« Hard Research On Blog Power | Main | Friday Festival Of Blog Bits »
April 20, 2006BELTWAY BLOGROLL
Judges Read Blogs, Too
If you want to know about the growing influence of legal blogs, third-year Ohio State University law student Ian Best is the man with the answers.
Late last week at his 3L Epiphany blog, he posted an entry that lists court decisions with blog citations. The list encompasses 23 cases from federal and state courts across the country. The states include California, Florida, Indiana, Massachusetts, New York, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio Tennessee, Utah, West Virginia and Wisconsin.
The earliest citation was in a 2003 case before the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of appeals; the rest occurred between 2004 and the present, with the latest being cases in Florida and Ohio this year.
"The blog with the most case citations is Sentencing Law and Policy, with 21 citations in 17 cases," Best wrote. He added that "three other well-known legal blogs" -- How Appealing, Legal Theory Blog and The Volokh Conspiracy -- merited citations, too.
Eugene Volokh praised Doug Berman of Sentencing Law and Policy for getting so much attention from judges. "Many (likely most) law professors never get that many court citations for all their law review articles put together, much less for their blog posts," Volokh wrote.
Best followed his research on blog citations in court cases with insightful interviews about blogs with two judges: U.S. District Judge Richard Kopf in Nebraska and Ohio Supreme Court Justice Judith Lanzinger. Both shared their insights about blogs and their blog-reading habits (Kopf reads them every day, Lanzinger only "periodically").
Lanzinger offered this warning: "Assuming that legal blogs are now in their infancy, and that they will grow to have a long and fruitful life, I think that lawyers who ignore them altogether will do so at their peril."
Kopf also shared his thoughts on how technology might lead to other changes in the legal world. He noted in particular the potential impact of both video and audio technology.
"[A]s video technology and the Net become interwoven," he said, "I see little reason to require witnesses to travel long distances to attend trials when they could as easily appear by interactive video. As another example, think about whether court reporters are needed given advances in digital audio recording. Digital audio recordings of trials can be provided over the Net, perhaps even in real time. Vendors located at any place in the world could access the digital audio over the Net and bid to provide transcriptions, presumably at very low prices."
(Hat tip to Concurring Opinions.)
Posted by | 09:04 AM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://amcblog.nationaljournal.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/584
