Monday, November 27, 2006

A New Kind of Academic Exchange

The idea for this blog/symposium germinated at the Law & Society conference last summer, when Jim Chen came to a panel on Law & Technology organized by Gaia Bernstein. I was commenting on papers by Gaia, Art Cockfield, and Lyria Bennett-Moses, and we decided we wanted to keep the conversation going in one way or another. Jim suggested publishing in the Minnesota Journal of Law, Science, and Technology, which has graciously offered to host our proceedings in an issue next year.

But we also wanted to create a new forum for discussing the ideas Gaia discussed above--one more open and participatory than the average academic conference, but a bit more focused than the average blog. So we gradually decided to have a blog that would focus on a series of "speakers" seriatim, with each taking "center stage" for a different week. That schedule appears on the right hand side.

The speaker will have an opportunity to post a paper, and/or to explain their ideas in a series of blog posts. Anyone can post any time, but there will be a focus on the speaker's ideas. Perhaps the closest analog is the "mobblog"--the University of Chicago Faculty Blawg recently hosted a very successful one on Sprigman & Raustiala's piece "The Piracy Paradox."

So you can think of Law & Technology Theory, for the next couple months, as something of an "extended mobblog," focusing on the work of various scholars working in the field. We're trying to strike a balance between openness and focus, and we hope you'll enjoy reading and commenting on the work here. And of course, our blog, like any technology, should be open to critique and modification. So let us know what you'd like to see!

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home