{"id":596,"date":"2019-07-30T12:43:20","date_gmt":"2019-07-30T16:43:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/georgetown-law-journal\/100-online\/the-internet-changed-everything-even-the-law-2\/"},"modified":"2025-05-12T11:14:19","modified_gmt":"2025-05-12T15:14:19","slug":"journal-unbound","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/georgetown-law-journal\/submit\/glj-online\/100-online\/journal-unbound\/","title":{"rendered":"Journal Unbound"},"content":{"rendered":"

At last year\u2019s Symposium in Celebration of Justice John Paul Stevens, sponsored by the Georgetown Law Journal, the recently retired jurist informed me that he knew my work.\u00a0 I was in my final semester at Georgetown, not a member of the\u00a0Journal<\/em>, and never once published\u2014nor intended to publish\u2014a student note in any law review.\u00a0 Rather, the symposium\u2019s nonagenarian of honor had read my blog.<\/p>\n

Justice Stevens has stated that he knew it was time to retire when he stumbled over some words while summarizing from the bench his epic dissent in\u00a0Citizens United<\/em>.\u00a0 But within the Court\u2019s remarkable debate over the merits of the case, another remarkable thing happened: both\u00a0Justice Anthony M. Kennedy\u2019s majority opinion<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Stevens\u2019s dissent<\/a>\u00a0made reference to blogs as akin to books and pamphlets in their ability to impact political reality.\u00a0 In so doing, the Court debuted the word \u201cblog\u201d into the United States Reports.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Chief Justice John G. Roberts has gone on the record as a skeptic of the printed law review\u2019s utility beyond the academy.\u00a0 In comments this summer to the Fourth Circuit Conference,\u00a0the Chief said<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Pick up a copy of any law review that you see, and the first article is likely to be, you know, the influence of Immanuel Kant on evidentiary approaches in 18th Century Bulgaria, or something, which I\u2019m sure was of great interest to the academic that wrote it, but isn\u2019t of much help to the bar.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This caricatured description of the bound quarterlies\u2019 contents provoked a flurry of commentary in the blogosphere, where journalists and academics countered the Chief\u2019s take.\u00a0 For example, Ken Jost,\u00a0CQ Researcher<\/em>\u2019s Supreme Court Editor and former EIC of GLJ (and, I understand, a fellow\u00a0Ipsa Loquitur<\/em>\u00a0introductory blogger)\u00a0noted the dissonance of the Chief\u2019s views<\/a>, which came on the heels of the Court\u2019s decision in\u00a0Wal-Mart v. Dukes<\/a><\/em>, a case that made ample reference to the late Professor Richard Nagareda\u2019s 2009 NYU Law Review article, \u201cClass Action Certification in the Age of Aggregate Proof.\u201d<\/p>\n

I do not highlight this disagreement to take sides, even if I do have my prejudices.\u00a0 Rather, I believe the Chief\u2019s comments, coupled with the recognition of blogs in\u00a0Citizens United<\/em>, set the stage quite nicely for the launch of\u00a0Ipsa Loquitur<\/em>.\u00a0 If executed well,\u00a0Ipsa Loquitur<\/em>\u00a0can defy the Chief\u2019s stereotype of law journal content by relentlessly reporting, analyzing, or even creating the moment\u2019s most engaging issues in law, policy, and politics.<\/p>\n

And this is where my happy meeting with Justice Stevens comes in.\u00a0 He learned of my blog not because of any affiliation with a top-tier law school.\u00a0 Rather, he knew my blog because it had a distinct identity that attracted readers and made for memorable coverage of and commentary on the Supreme Court.\u00a0 Indeed, law school rules don\u2019t apply on the blogs.\u00a0 Here, no one cares about rankings or GPAs or resumes.\u00a0 The Main Journal masthead won\u2019t impress info-hungry Internet trawlers looking for something worthwhile in their RSS reader.\u00a0 In this world, the strength of a governing idea\u2014an identity, a purpose, a personality, an angle\u2014is what separates the must-reads from the ether-shouters.<\/p>\n

The challenge, then, for\u00a0Ipsa Loquitur<\/em>\u00a0is to figure out how to separate its guiding purpose and values from that of a law journal.\u00a0 Whereas GLJ\u2019s existence is justified by staffing itself with bluebookers who aced 1L and making up for its limited readership with future citations in the U.S. Reports,\u00a0Ipsa Loquitur<\/em>\u00a0must look beyond the journal office to identify its writers not by their statistics but rather by their voices.\u00a0 Without such personalities whose words can ring throughout the legal community and into the greater blogosphere,\u00a0Ipsa Loquitur<\/em>\u00a0will become just another law journal\u2019s online supplement masking its milquetoast nature with a cute and clever name, and will suffer from the very irrelevance that the Chief has attributed to its printed parent.<\/p>\n

But as a Georgetown Law alumnus, I know that one can\u2019t go three feet on campus without encountering someone wonderfully worked up over something happening somewhere in the world.\u00a0 Give those people a platform and\u00a0Ipsa Loquitur<\/em>\u00a0will succeed . . . and still have space for an online colloquy promoting the upcoming GLJ issue\u2019s lead article presenting a Rawlsian interpretation of the Coase Theorum\u2019s impact on the adjudicative systems of\u00a0uncontacted Amazonian tribes<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Mike Sacks L\u201910 is current the Supreme Court reported for\u00a0<\/em>The Huffington Post. He\u00a0created and maintained\u00a0<\/em>First One @ One First, a Court-watching blog.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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