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Blogs and Law School
Perspectives Wanted: I'm working on a short article about law students and blogs. If you are a law student (or soon-to-be or recently-graduated law student) or a law professor and you have any thoughts about the relationship between blogs and law school that you'd like to share, please comment or drop me an email. I'm specifically looking for thoughts and/or anecdotes in the realm of the following:
- Why do law students blog?
- What can law students gain from blogging? (Does reading and/or writing blogs help you get better grades? Does it make school more fun or interesting? Does it make you feel less lonely/scared/anxious/etc? Does it add something to your law school experience?)
- What do you find most enjoyable or valuable about reading or writing a blog? (If you're a reader, what are the best posts or blogs to read and why? If you're a blog author, what have been your best experiences with blogging?)
- Have you made any contacts via blogging that have led to professional advancement of some kind? For example, has anyone gotten job leads via a blog that actually turned into a job? Or have you learned about any other opportunities via blogging that have somehow been good for your legal career?
- Does your school have a "blog community"? By that I mean, do you know and/or interact with other bloggers at your school?
- Do you have any thoughts about law professors who blog? Do you find law prof blogs interesting or helpful in any way? Would you like to see more of them? Or do you find law profs who blog generally talk about things that don't interest you?
- If you're a law professor with a blog, why do you do it? What have you gained? Do you read student blogs? Do you think blogging is a valuable activity for law students? If so, why? If not, why?
Meanwhile, this project has provided a good excuse to do a little research into the nascent field of blog history. A few interesting tidbits: According to Matthew Haughey and Peter Merholz, the word "blog" was coined by Merholz in about May of 1999. Blogger was born in August, 1999. This FAQ by Jorn Barger on RobotWisdom also offers an interesting snapshot of where blogs were in September 1999. It suggests the What's New page at Mosaic may have been the first blog, way back in 1993. Dave Winer says the first blog was the first web site built by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN. According to Rebecca Blood's history of weblogs, Barger was also the first to apply the term "weblog" to what we know today as blogs. The BlockStar Timeline puts all these pieces together.
According to this article, blogs are booming today:
Technorati, a San Francisco research company, says there are about 2.5 million blogs, with 10,000 being created each day.
The Pew Research Center estimates that between 2 and 7 percent of adult Internet users write a blog, and 11 percent visit blogs.
As for how many of those blogs are "blawgs" (or law-related blogs), the Legally-Inclined Webring currently has 449 members. If there's a better way to gauge the size of the legal blogging community, I'm not sure what it is. For comparison purposes, Denise Howell's blogroll at Bag and Baggage is quite extensive and clocks in at approximately 138 law student blogs (those "Learning the Craft"), around 52 "Academic" blogs (most of which are presumably written by law professors), and about 215 blogs in the "Practicing" category. So, according to these sources, the legal blogging community currently numbers
Posted 05:47 AM | law school meta-blogging
WIR #3: When clients are crazy
Week three of the public defender summer internship was short but eventful. I feel I'm settling in a little, getting more comfortable with feeling lost, perhaps. After three weeks, I'm impressed and surprised with the human pace of the work. The attorneys in the office stay quite busy and there seems to be plenty of work to keep a posse of interns busy, as well, yet only a handful of the attorneys seem to stay late or come in too early, and the atmosphere of the office is serious but not oppressive or too fast-paced. I'm sure not all public defenders enjoy this kind of pace, and I'm sure it feels different as an attorney than it does as an intern, but so far it seems that the promise is true that this sort of law practice is less all-consuming of time and energy than BigLaw.
Highlights of this week included some fireworks in court, a crash course in criminal procedure, and a visit to jail.
The fireworks in court were shocking, really, from the perspective of someone learning about and considering becoming a public defender. First, I watched as one of our attorneys (a public defender) entered the lockup adjacent to the courtroom to confer with a client prior to that client's appearance in court. Through the closed door, we could hear the client yelling at the attorney, and several minutes later she emerged looking stunned and on the verge of tears. She immediately left the courtroom, and I soon learned that outside in the hall she had passed the verge and was crying, after her client verbally attacked her competence and intelligence. Apparently she didn't feel physically threatened because the client was restrained in his cell, but she was still seriously shaken by his yelling. Later, after the attorney had recovered, her client emerged and asked to represent himself. I'm told that usually this judge would be loathe to grant such a request, and would usually order the public defender to act as assistant counsel to the pro se defendant. Not this time. The judge lectured the client on how stupid he was for giving up such good representation, and then granted his request. The public defender didn't mind.
The same day, one of "my" attorney's clients (by "my" attorney, I mean the attorney I'm working for this summer) showed up for trial in an apparently "altered" state of mind. Long story short, he tried to dismiss his own charges by signing a dismissal order as if he were the judge. "But that has no authority," my attorney told him.
"No authority?" he asked. "I put my copyright on there, it's authority."
"But the judge will know he didn't sign it."
"I am the judge!"
Ok. So my attorney told the client she was going to have to raise the question of his competence before the judge, the client got angry and said he was going to ask for different counsel, my attorney said fine. Then, while waiting for the case to be called, the client decided to leave the courthouse. He just took off. Not a good day.
I rushed through that story, but trust me, it was a pretty crazy experience. How can you help people as an attorney if they try so hard to make it impossible for you to help them?
The crash course in crim pro was just that, about four hours covering the basics of how to run a case from the time an attorney meets a client to trial. I was shocked by the degree to which state legislatures are free to depart from federal rules and procedures, and the degree to which states are free to stack the deck against defendants when it comes to rules of evidence and discovery. Although prosecutors have an ethical duty to provide all exculpatory evidence to the defense, they don't always do so. What's worse, according to our attorney-teacher, they're probably less likely to do so in bigger cases.
This is consistent with small and large reminders I've picked up in the past few weeks that people working in law enforcement and criminal prosecution don't always care too much about the truth. In just three weeks, I've seen police lie on the witness stand, and I've heard prosecutors bully defense attorneys over very minor issues. Such things certainly diminish whatever respect I had for the criminal justice system, but they also increase the incentive to go into criminal defense—the need for good defenders is real.
Finally, the jail. Unfortunately, the jail will have to wait because I have to run to work. I'm sure I'll be visiting the jail again before the summer's over so I'll say more about it after I've been more than once.
I also wanted to send good wishes to my fellow 1Ls and beyond who are doing fascinating legal jobs elsewhere, but I've run out of time to track down the links so instead I'll just say: Have a good week, everyone!
