Katharina Isabel Schmidt (Yale Law School) offers a comparative look at US and German law journals, blogs, and their uses in the transmission of legal ideas
here in a post at the
Völkerrechtsblog (English translation: Public International Law Blog). Here's an excerpt.
American law journals are interesting for the most part, if not
necessarily always useful. German law journals, in turn, while useful
for the most part, are not necessarily always interesting. As adumbrated
above, this is due to the particular division of competences within the
German legal profession on the one hand and the American legal
profession on the other hand. German scholars, unlike their American
counterparts, are routinely cited in court decisions. As such, they have
no choice but to deliver the doctrinal goods expected of them. In the
United States, unlike in Germany, placing articles in top-tier journals
constitutes a necessary step on the long and winding road to tenure. As
such, one can hardly blame aspiring academics for pretending to reinvent
the wheel one case note at a time. In addition, trans-Atlantic
divergences in the structure of legal education naturally influence the
extent to which German and American jurists are able to produce and
consume interdisciplinary knowledge. The – admittedly overblown –
distinction between the common and the civil law tradition further
contributes to making matters look positively discombobulated.
For some folks, that last sentence conveys fighting words! ;) Ms. Schmidt goes on to suggest that one way to further invigorate the intellectual tradition is to exploit the blog format.
At the same time I would argue that blogs like the present one hold the
potential to facilitate conversations about law that are free from the
intricate constraints of national legal science. In particular, the kind
of jurisprudential writing they make possible confronts scholars and
practitioners alike with ideas that lie outside the realm of their
necessarily limited intellectual experience. It is in this way that
blogs and other non-traditional platforms allow for a much-needed
re-appreciation of what it means to be a jurist in the 21st
century. Therefore, the goal of law blogs and similar projects should be
an attempt to counterbalance the deficits inherent in traditional
approaches to the exchange of ideas about law and the legal profession –
deficits exemplified by my discussion of contemporary American and
German law journal culture.
Hannah Birkenkötter (Humboldt University) responds to the notion of evolving structures of intellectual transmission in a post
here. An excerpt:
In her insightful and very pertinent blog post
on legal formats, Katharina Isabel Schmidt takes a comparative look at
law journals and legal formats in the US and Germany, the two systems
that she is familiar with. Most of her observations correspond to my
experience (although I have only spent a few weeks in the US, so most of
my observations are grounded in conversation with colleagues and
friends as well as reading American-authored scholarship rather than
first-hand experience “on the ground”) and I wholeheartedly agree that
comparative looks at legal formats allow us to “re-imagine the future of
legal knowledge production”. I am skeptical, however, whether
non-traditional means of knowledge production, in particular blogs,
truly have the “potential to facilitate conversations about law that are
free from the intricate constraints of national legal science” (emphasis my own). I’ve rather found legal blogs, or blawgs,
especially of the academic type, to be quite different depending on the
legal culture they are rooted in. I certainly agree that blogs have the
potential, and are actually used as a means to disturb existing
hierarchies and conventions of scientific communication, and that on
both sides of the Atlantic. But at the same time, they are not free of
their respective legal traditions.
But as Ms. Birkenkötter notes, blogs do allow new identities, regardless of the tradition, to emerge, more so in the US, perhaps less so in Germany, "While not free from constraints, they provide alternative platforms and
thus room for alternative topics, actors and approaches. This very
conversation is, in my view, proof of it. So let’s continue the talk."
I fully agree. I would point out that, in addition to blogs, other formats have emerged, including online law review journals, such as
Stanford Law Review Online. The Library of Congress has
a listing of journals available online, although not all journals listed are exclusively "online" journals; some are print journals with an online presence and/or online "exclusives." Such an online approach allows frequent updating and permits a publication to address "up to the minute" topics and breaking news. It allows academics to "be relevant." It lets us use the more effective and efficient features of the web, including the ability to be interactive and to respond to critiques quickly, so that we really can engage in conversation on a frequent basis, rather than wait until those pleasant but increasingly expensive conferences roll around. Maybe we'll now get more out of them.
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