A little while ago I noted that the University of Chicago Law Faculty had a Faculty Blog. Interesting, I thought.

I think this new Yale Law Journal experiment (also via Jack Balkin) is even more interesting:

‘ The Yale Law Journal has started an innovative experiment in the traditional world of law reviews– The Pocket Part. TPP is not another online law review, and it’s not another blog. Rather it’s an electronic companion to the regular editions of the Yale Law Journal, featuring shorter versions of articles from the Journal plus commentary by other scholars, along with a comments section so that still others can participate in the discussion. This is an excellent way to supplement the scholarly work of law reviews and I wish the editors great success. If The Pocket Part catches on, I predict it will change the way we think about law reviews and what one can do with them. In particular, TPP shows how you might turn a one-to-many medium published infrequently with high barriers to participation into a participatory medium that permits a continuous conversation and that is organized around scholarly work of the highest quality.


Way cool. Or, at least, way cool for sick technology-fascinated law geeks like me.

PS: not sure what a Pocket Part is? I didn’t either until I studied over in the United States. In the US, many paper publications – like copies of the US Code, or textbooks – have ‘pocket parts’ – updates issued between new editions. They are thin soft cover publications which are inserted into a ‘pocket’ found in the published edition at the back. They are ‘parts’ inserted into the ‘pocket’ of the published work. Thus the name, ‘pocket part’. In legal research classes in the states, we were told ‘always look at the pocket part’ to get the latest. Gotta love those lawyers for harking back to precedent and tradition.

6:49 pm - posted by . Categories: Cool
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