My admonishing of Larry Solum for misrepresenting the views of his professional colleagues is already having a constructive effect, as evidenced here. Of course, in this latter case, the person whose talk is being recorded is a veteran blogger, so likely to actually read the blog in question, catch any errors, and respond. In the Solum case, by contrast, those whose arguments were mischaracterized never would have learned how they were being portrayed to perhaps thousands of students and faculty if I hadn't flagged it for them. This bears on a point some have made in defence of Solum's practice, namely, "How is this different from a book review? Book reviews sometimes misrepresent someone's views too, after all." Indeed, but there are rather a lot of pertinent differences between book reviews and blogging conferences, for example:
(1) Book reviews are based on a written text, and are usually not written in "real time," both facts which reduce the risk of mistakes and misinterpretations substantially.
(2) Book reviews generally come to the attention of the author, partly because authors look for reviews of their books and authors are usually sent reviews by their publisher. Aggrieved authors can, of course, respond, either with letters to the editor, or subsequent articles. The vast majority of scholars do not read blogs; most of those I talked to about the Rawls blogging were astonished to learn that their remarks had been recorded like this. Perhaps the notoriety of the Rawls conference blogging will lead anyone giving a talk at a conference Larry Solum attends to monitor his blog for misrepresentations in the future.
(3) Book reviews generally reach a specialist audience, which has two advantages in terms of reducing the rate of error: the reviewer has to meet a high standard, because s/he knows that specialists will read the review; and specialists are far more likely to detect errors and misrepresentations and respond, formally and informally. This whole blogosphere discussion resulted from the fact that I actually know something about the views of many of the speakers at the Rawls conference, so in reading Solum's account, various claims lept out at me as not making sense. (I am equally struck by the fact that the enthusiastic defenses of Solum's blogging of the Rawls conference come from those who know very little about the subject-matter.) Except for my commenting on Solum's blogging, it seems likely that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of non-specialists would have been left with false impressions of the ideas and presentations of some of the speakers. (It might fairly be said that circulating misrepresentations among non-specialists really is of less concern to specialists in any case, and perhaps that is right. On the other hand, many law students appear to read Solum's blog--as I remarked previously, it's a great resource, with lots of valuable stuff for students especially--and it does seem an injustice for one's students to be misled as to one's work this way.)
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