Professor Eugene Mazo is spending January 2015 as a guest blogger on Prawfsblawg, one of the most widely read blogs in the legal academy. Prawfsblawg invited Professor Mazo to share his thoughts about life and the law with his colleagues and students this month. “What an honor,” Professor Mazo said. “I’m new to blogging and am not even sure how many readers I’ll have.”
So far, he has had plenty. For a blog post about what kinds of feedback academic authors can expect to receive on their draft articles and how this market should work, Professor Mazo received numerous comments and another thread was even started by Paul Horwitz of the University of Alabama building upon Professor’s Mazo’s typology of law professors. Another of Professor Mazo’s posts about whether and how professors can keep a hand in practice while teaching at the same time has also caused sharp debate in the blogsphere.
In the past several years, law professor blogs have revolutionized how professors communicate and disseminate ideas. Prawfsblawg is among the most well-known blogs for law professors, along with The Faculty Lounge, Concurring Opinions, Leiter Reports, the Volokh Conspiracy, and Balkinization. All of them similarly try to bring the ideas of the legal academy to life.
Prawfblawg was started by Daniel Markel, a professor of law from Florida State University who will tragically murdered during the summer of 2014 at his home in Tallahassee, Fla. Markel, a specialist in criminal law, had many friends on the Wake Forest faculty, including Executive Associate Dean for Academic Affairs Ronald Wright and Markel’s co-author Jennifer Collins, who was the former Vice Provost of Wake Forest and recently became dean of Southern Methodist University’s law school.
“There’s no question that Danny was extremely influential in the legal academy,” Professor Mazo said. “He had a reputation for introducing people to each other, for nurturing ideas, and for building entire communities. I didn’t know him particularly well, and yet I consistently read his blog and can honestly say that I was influenced by the idea I read on it. I’ll be blogging this month partly in his memory.”