Paul L. Caron
Dean





Thursday, October 31, 2024

Podcasting As Legal Scholarship

Sara Y. Gras (Seton Hall), Positioning Podcasting as Legal Scholarship, 2024 Utah L. Rev. 189: 

Utah law reviewTechnology has revolutionized legal practice, education, and society generally, yet the availability of new forms of digital media has not significantly changed the locus of legal scholarship. This Article examines whether our collective understanding of where scholarship can exist should expand to include podcasting as a formally acknowledged medium for legal scholarship. Student-edited law journals remain the primary vehicle for disseminating law faculty scholarship, as well as an important measure of faculty productivity and success as scholars, even though most legal research is conducted online. Despite acknowledged structural limitations and biases inherent in the academic law review system, traditional print law journals continue to be more highly placed on the hierarchy than their online counterparts. 

Alternatives like blogging never achieved popular acceptance as a legitimate site for legal scholarship. The continued resistance of the legal academy to utilizing new forms of media presents a real threat to the relevance and broader impact of legal scholarship. The goal of my inquiry is to promote necessary attitudinal and institutional change to facilitate the ongoing creation of significant legal scholarship in the form of podcasts. This discussion requires an interrogation of whether scholarship is defined by its content, or whether the medium in which it is delivered also matters, but it is not a condemnation of traditional written scholarship, nor an endorsement for podcasting as a venue for every scholar’s work. Rather, it presents a nuanced case for broadening the definition of what legal scholarship looks(or sounds) like to build new audiences for the work of legal academics.

Editor's Note:  If you would like to receive a daily email with links to legal education posts on TaxProf Blog, email me here.

https://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2024/10/podcasting-as-legal-scholarship.html

Legal Ed Scholarship, Legal Education, Scholarship | Permalink