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LawSites (Robert Ambrogi) writes :

“How to explain blawgs? ‘Professorial behavior patterns.’

I missed Eugene Volokh’s day 2 BloggerCon panel on blogs and the law, but Doug Simpson reports that Volokh, commenting on why lawyers blog, said the motive is largely not monetary. Rather, many law blogs are what he called ‘prof blogs,’ written by professors or folks with ‘professorial behavior patterns.’ Not sure that fully explains all the entries on Denise Howell’s blawg list. I think the motive is, indeed, money for many lawyer bloggers. Not direct cash in the pocket, of course, but a payoff in greater exposure generally and greater credibility within a given field, leading somewhere down the line to more referrals, more clients and more — yes — money.”

“Gee”, as Prof. John Kaplan used to exclaim, using his favorite expression at Stanford Law School in my student days, “is that really true?”

Although few of us would doubt the general observation that mankind is a mercenary lot, I seriously doubt that “money” is the major impetus for blawging – yet – so I would give Eugene’s explanation of “professorial behavior patterns” a good deal of credence.

It would in fact seem to me that profess-or-ship is the ultimate in “punditry” and that is why one of the meanings given to the word “professor” by the online American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition (2000), at bartleby.com is “one who professes”.

The term “profess” in turn means “to affirm openly, declare or claim”, “to make a pretense of, pretend”, “to practice as a profession or claim knowledge of”, “to teach as a professor” e.g. to “profess literature”.

In fact, if in the full text search at Roget’s Thesaurus we plug in the term “pundit”, we get ONLY two entries returned, namely “scholar” and “lawyer”.

I would call that the thesauric punditry double whammy on a professor of law particularly, or to put it more simply, “he can really not do otherwise than blog”, it is in the nature of the “profess-ion”.

Remember, the lawyers (i.e. the legal beagles or their comparables in any culture) run things, i.e. the temporal world – and I think this says something about the value, importance and application of blogging in the future. Could a popular “blogger” of today be a “President” tomorrow? Probably. That is not necessarily a “cash” objective.