Publish (Tweets and Blogs) or Perish? Legal Academia in Times of Social Media

Abstract

As President Trump reminds us every day, we live in the era of social media. While legal scholars are busy discussing, rethinking and opening fields of law to accommodate the societal changes triggered by the Internet, they have been rather slow in assessing its potential impact on their own communication and publishing practices. This is a blind spot, which this paper aims to explore. More precisely, this piece argues that blogs and social media are suitable communication means for legal scholarship and provides some pragmatic advice on how to use them. This paper first draws a general sketch of two key transformations in legal scholarship: the transnationalization of legal scholarship and the desacralization of the legal texts. It is argued that they are provoked by the rapid digitalization of our societies and are key drivers of a needed shift in scholarly communication. They constitute the wider backdrop for the analysis in the second and third sections of the function and practice of blogs and Twitter in legal scholarship.