Wow! Another cool blawg project is born!

Blawg Review is the name.

“Making the best of the blawgosphere more easily accessible and enjoyable to read” is the game.

Thanks to that hugely creative and innovative duo, Kevin Heller and Evan Schaeffer, for launching this project. It’s been added to my blogroll under “Blogs, General Legal,” and to my personal bloglines reading list (now at 143 feeds — Yikes!)

To better understand what this is all about, see what the “Anonymous Editor of Blawg Review” says:

“Oh Yeah, It’s Over for Law Review”

Just as weblogs have had a huge impact on mainstream media, bringing down rather pompous network news anchors and discredited journalists from fake news agencies, law blogs are providing critical analyses of topical legal issues that are changing how we look at Law Review.

What the hell is law review, anyway? Let’s start with the basics. Law reviews are academic legal journals that publish articles by law professors, judges, lawyers and even law students. If you think that sounds boring, you are so right.

Blawg Review will have a few different activities, all bringing together the best of the Blogosphere, with open source style participation.

One activity will be Blawg reviews:

Everyone can get involved by writing a review of a blawg and submitting it for publication here. You can submit a review of any blawg you like, and even one you don’t like. It doesn’t have to be a famous blawg with a million page views a month, and it doesn’t have to be a rave review. Reviews don’t have to be serious; we’ll accept hilarious.

Maybe you’d like your blawg reviewed. Do tell us about it, and we’ll see if one of our editors would be up for that—or is it down with that? I guess that’s why we have editors.

From time to time, our contributing editors will write blawg reviews here, but mostly the reviews will be contributed by readers and bloggers.

Another activity is hosting the weekly Blawg Review (see Hosting Guidelines). It will rotate amongst volunteer blawger-hosts thusly:

Blawg Review will be published on a different law blog every Monday, commencing April 11, 2005 at Notes from the (Legal) Underground, where it will be pulled together by Evan Schaeffer in his inimitable style.

If you’d like to host an upcoming Blawg Review on your law blog, just let us know the Date Available that you would prefer to host, by sending an email addressed to:

host at blawg review dot com

Finally, one and all are invited to submit Blawg posts for inclusion in the weekly Review:

Please send an email addressed in standard form to:

post at blawg review dot com

This is the only address you’ll ever need to know to submit any post to Blawg Review. Through technology that amazes us, this email address automatically forwards submissions to the attention of the next host. For more details, see Submission Guidelines

I’m looking forward to participating in this project and reading the weekly reviews.

Personally, I don’t expect it to ever completely replace law school law reviews. But the latter will be transformed.

And I’m not totally negative on law reviews. I did learn a few valuable lessons from my stint on the Indiana Law Journal:

1) cite form;

2) the importance, when responding to motions and briefs, of doing substantive cite-checking (i.e. does the case say what they say it says? In my experience, at least half the time the answer is no);

3) dealing with editors (in law practice, these are clients and partners), while maintaining the proper amount of ego-involvement in one’s own writing — not too much and not too little (i.e. graciously accepting good suggestions and aggressively sticking up for your writing in the face of bad ones); and

4) remaining aware of the sometimes dramatic extent to which meaning may be improperly altered by language-based editing (i.e., when I did substantive cite checking, I noted frequent instances when marked textual changes made by editors to make the text read better caused it to depart significantly from the substance of the cited authority).

The last point seems to be what Judge Posner’s getting at in the quote at the top of the Blawg Review:”Welcome to a world where inexperienced editors make articles about the wrong topics worse.”

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