By Ann W. Parks

Panelists Lee Peoples of the Oklahoma City University School of Law, Margaret Schilt of the University of Chicago and Chris Borgen at St. John's University pose with Georgetown Law librarian Sara Sampson. This panel discussed the research value of blogs.

Bob Berring, the Walter Perry Johnson Professor of Law at the University of California-Berkeley's Boalt Hall School of Law, makes the opening remarks as Georgetown Law librarian Peggy Fry looks on.

      Weblogs, or "blogs," are transforming the world of legal scholarship and discussion to an extent unimaginable just a few years ago. In a matter of minutes, experts can hold court on everything from Guantanamo Bay detainees to the most recent Supreme Court decision. Blogs are increasingly being cited in court cases and law review articles, and the Bluebook - the law student's Bible for citing statutes and court cases correctly - now has a rule for dealing with blogs. Certain blogs, in fact, can be a valuable source of legal information.

      Consider the challenges faced by the legal librarian.

      Blogs cited in a court case or a law review article - information used to prove or disprove a particular point of view-can be accessible one minute and gone the next. In the blogosphere, nobody can be absolutely sure that the information posted has been checked, let alone double checked, by experts in the field. And if blogs are a form of academic scholarship - as most agree they can be - then whose job is it to preserve all the blogs, or even to decide what's worth keeping?

      Those were some of the questions asked at "The Future of Today's Legal Scholarship," a symposium held on Saturday, July 25 at Georgetown Law. The symposium was held in honor of Professor Bob Oakley, director of Georgetown's law library from 1982 until his death in 2007.

      "Those of you who knew Bob recall his deep interest in promoting access to legal information and the responsibility that librarians have to preserve and authenticate that information," librarian Peggy Fry said before the symposium began - adding that Oakley "delighted in the uses of" new technology to advance those causes. "He surely would have agreed with the assumption underlying this program that blogging can and should be recognized as a form of scholarship."

A different language

      Bob Berring, a professor at the University of California-Berkeley's Boalt Hall School of Law, noted that society is in the middle of a generation gap in the way that people use information - with students speaking a different information language than the one he learned.

      "I learn Spanish so that I can go to Spain; they are native speakers," he said. On the other hand, Berring says he knows a language that younger generations do not - particularly when it comes to information that is trusted and accurate. "My language is the language of books. libraries, indexes and double lookups and, I would contend, an entire structure of authority, of trust and authoritative sources that's not part of their world. They live in a different world, and there's no legitimate or illegitimate side to this."

      Panels looked at the research value, reliability and preservation of blogs. Chris Borgen, an associate professor of law at St. John's University, said that blogs aren't going to replace law reviews any time soon - but asserted that bloggers have done a better job than the mainstream media in dissecting legal issues such as the detainees at Guantánamo, Abu Graib and torture. Borgen noted the work that former Georgetown Law professor Marty Lederman and others have done in this area.

      "They really did some incredible work in terms of vetting the legal aspects of these issues," he said. Legal experts were able to discuss the issues faster on blogs than in law reviews and could bring their own expertise to the table, rather than having to instruct the mainstream media on the ins and outs of the Geneva Convention. "These are some of the things that have played to the strengths of blogs."

      Librarians instrumental in the planning of the day's events included Jennifer Davitt, Catherine Dunn, Kumar Jayasuriya, Sara Sampson and Sarah Rhodes. And their mentor, Robert Oakley, would have been proud.

      "He was exactly the right person at exactly the right place, being at Georgetown, being in Washington, being at the place where he could use his expertise, work with Congress, stand up for the rights of law librarians and the public in the long run," Berring said of Oakley, who at the time of his death in 2007 served as the Washington affairs representative of the American Association of Law Libraries. "He was always one of my information heroes."

For more on the preservation of digital information at Georgetown, don't miss the next issue of Georgetown Law Magazine.

To view a Webcast of the event, please visit http://www.law.georgetown.edu/webcast/eventDetail.cfm?eventID=872 .