Margaret A. Schilt, faculty services librarian at the D’Angelo Law Library for the University of Chicago, asks Is the Future of Legal Scholarship in the Blogosphere?:
If you are looking for the future of legal scholarship, chances are that you may find it not in a treatise or the traditional law review but in a different form, profoundly influenced by the blogosphere.
…Blogging contributes to the shortened life cycle of a theory or idea, reflected in what is called the open access movement. Law review articles no longer meet their readers first in published and printed form. Good articles start their lives as idea papers, posted on the Social Science Research Network’s Legal Scholarship Network or another electronic repository. Repositories such as the SSRN provide a place for scholars to post their work, either in abstract or in full. These papers are available to the public generally for reading and comment. Bloggers post links to them with short descriptions ("Highly recommended!" "Download this while it’s hot!") and respond in blog posts. By the time the prestigious law review accepts the submission and publishes the article, the scholarly community has built upon the insights in the article and moved on.