I get asked this often enough by philosophers and philosophy readers that I might as well address it on the blog. Anyone who couldn't care less about academic law blogs should move right along!
The first thing to observe is that the legal academic blogosphere is actually politcally diverse, and includes a rather good, generally liberal law blog and a feminist law professors blog, among others. But the traffic these blogs generate is dwarfed, to be sure, by the crazed right-wing blogs, namely "Instapundit" (or "Insta-Ignorance" as we aptly dubbed it years ago), Althouse, the Volokh blog, and, more recently, "Legal Insurrection," a blog by a clinical law professor at Cornell.
Key to the success of all these blogs is "Instapundit," the blog by the reprehensible University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds, whose sui generis combination of ignorance and moral depravity has made him the mainstay of the far right blogosphere (well outside academia), and who links vigorously to any academic he can find who is benighted as he is. (Being a friend of the First Amendment, I should note that I've come to Professor Reynolds's defense against other law professors who think that his instituton should punish him for his foolish opinions; the University of Tennesee, alas, is stuck with Professor Reynolds.) Ann Althouse, a University of Wisconsin law professor, had a modest scholarly reputation for her work in constitutional law in the 1990s, but her blogging cyber-fame over the past several years (due to Reynolds's endless links) also coincided with the collapse of the scholarly writing part of her day job (thank God for tenure!). (This, by the way, is still the funniest commentary on Althouse's brainless blogging I've ever read. I link to this with apologies to my friends at the University of Wisconsin Law School--I understand that, like their colleagues at Tennessee, they are stuck with their albatross for the duration.) The Volokh blog, orchestrated by Eugene Volokh (UCLA)--a solid and informative First Amendment doctrinalist and somewhat embarrassing intellectual lightweight otherwise--is clearly the most substantive of the right-wing blogs, with some knowledgeable contributors (as well as some loopy fringe cases). But the bottom line is all these blogs owe their traffic and visibility to Instapundit and to the masses of benighted souls that comprise the Right Wing Blob, which thrives on talk radio, blogs, cyberspace, and so on.
The appearance that the legal academic blogosphere "tilting to the right" is partly, then, just that, a matter of appearances (the right-wing legal academic blogs get considerable traffic thanks to InstaIgnorance, but most of that traffic is from outside academia). But it is also partly a matter of the reality that law schools tilt further to the right than, say, philosophy departments, on average. Even allowing for the latter, the right-wing blogs like Volokh et al. are generally much farther to the right than is even common in legal academia. I suspect part of the explanation for that fact is that far right legal academics find cyberspace attractive precisely because there is a huge and appreciative cyber-audience for right-wing punditry. Certainly, the intellectual level at which hacks like Reynolds and Althouse operate makes them a particularly good fit for cyberspace, but even the more serious academics who post on the right-wing blogs must surely find there a more congenial, receptive audience than they do in many parts of academe.
ADDENDUM: A reader sends this funny item about the "Legal Insurrection" blog.
NOV 21 UPDATE: In the cyber-annals of narcissistic stupidity, this 'response' certainly ranks near the top, right along with the Right Wing Blob's "insight" that what really motivates Paul Krugman is "envy."
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