Douglas Berman is a law professor at the Ohio State University. His primary area of focus is criminal law and sentencing. He’s written extensively on the topic, co-authored a casebook entitled Sentencing Law and Policy: Cases, Statutes and Guidelines, served as an editor of the Federal Sentencing Reporter for over ten years, and co-found and currently co-edits the Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law. He is also the creator and author of the widely-read and widely-cited web blog, Sentencing Law and Policy. Douglas has been blogging since 2004 and is considered a trailblazer in the legal blogging world.

Episode Summary:

Doug begins by sharing the difficulties of being a law professor during COVID. He discusses the trajectory of his career in law through both academia and practice. Doug discusses his original vision of blogging, specifically regarding the relevance of archiving. He elaborates on his experience with blogging from the beginning and how it has evolved since he began. Then, he offers some insight into the role of blogging in legal academia and the benefits that it offers over other alternative mediums. He discusses some of the notable organizations that have cited him, including the Supreme Court, and explains some of the more controversial content that he has published on his blog. Doug also discusses the credibility he’s earned in his field and how he keeps up with his constantly changing field. He discusses the overall impact that blogging has had on his career and perception of the legal field. He closes by sharing some advice for those drawn to blogging.


What was your original vision for your blog?

I imagined it really being a service to faculty, myself included, with the teaching from the text. They would go in and see “Oh good, Berman’s got a new report that just came from the Sentencing Commission.” Maybe I’ll want to share that with students, maybe I won’t but it’s a nice way to kind of keep up with what’s going on, and this is exactly the serendipity of timing. Static websites seemed out of date pretty quickly, unless you are regularly updating them. That’s what I felt was so appealing about the way blogs were structured.

I also lucked into getting connected to the Law Professors Blog Network. You could have some static content on the sidebars, so you’d have some sort of permanent matters there, but then the internal structure would just be these updating posts, and people would know what’s out of date and what’s not. You’re going to have  technology itself effectively signal “Okay, this is kind of a newer stuff, and this is the older stuff.” And an archive is a really really important thing; I still care a lot about maintaining my blog archives. But it just seemed to fit so well with what I was hoping to achieve, not just supplementing the textbook produced but also my own kind of evolution about what was going on and the value of keeping a running tab on what other people were doing as well.

What do you see as the role of blogging in legal scholarship?

I actually think blogs are an amazing thing for law professors to do. Early on, especially when there were lots of folks at different levels of kind of hierarchy in a legal academia, there were a lot of conversations about whether or not it was appropriate for law professors to be doing it. In that debate, what I like so much about blogging and what leads me to persistently advise junior academics and others to jump into this space is that it’s an area in which I feel like I can be serving all three missions that we think professors should do at the same time. In academia, we have teaching responsibilities, we have scholarship expectations, and then we have service expectations. Those all are vague in a bunch of different ways but there’s teaching classroom scholarship, writing your law review articles, and service might be being on a committee you’re working with the local bar on our association project or whatever. And there’s a risk at times in doing all of those roles at the same time. I found over time, as I was blogging, I would do things that I could bring into the classroom.generally expect my students to keep up with my blog and notice the real time things I’m covering there and not directly in the classroom.

Your’s was the first blog ever to be cited by the US Supreme Court and you’ve also been cited by a number of Appellate District Court rulings, right?

That’s correct. I always clarify that the Supreme Court citation was for a document that was exclusively on my blog, but I still think that counts because of course I was providing access to a document that the Supreme Court didn’t know. It wasn’t anywhere else and that gets me back to something that I think is a huge part of what I try to achieve through the blog, which is, for me, transparency and accessibility in our justice systems at large and the sentencing system in particular are such important sets of values. A big thing that I’m always trying to provide access to original sources to provide information that may not otherwise be readily accessible, you know, whether it’s the law students, actually lawyers, or the broader academic community. And so it’s been interesting for me to be able to claim to the first blog cited by the US Supreme Court and then have to specify, “Well, it was my editorial choice to publish this document that wasn’t available other places; it wasn’t my unique commentary there,” and it actually feeds into other courts citing me. I know there was a real reservation about whether it was sort of appropriate to cite a blog post as opposed to an article that you might find on a blog. I think that’s another thing that has changed over time right, courts have become more comfortable with not only citing to blog posts but understanding that there’s a heck of a lot of things that are already on the internet.

Do you have any advice for people interested in blogging?

I would say anybody who is drawn to the idea, find the website that works for you and start doing it. If it doesn’t fit you for whatever reasons, you move on to something else. I would also say, figure out both your voice and your vision. Not in a very detailed way, you don’t need to come up with a mission statement for your blog. Decide if you want it to be relatively professional. Some firms are very formalized, and that’s fine obviously, but it’s perfectly appropriate to be funny to figure out your voice too. It can be great fun; you learn things, and it’s amazing what sites you’ll find when looking for a good picture for a particular idea, which is a gain part of the voice and vision on a particular topic.Last but not least—this is most important for me on a day-to-day basis—do it for yourself. Do it in a way that if nobody reads your blog, writing the post will have been time well spent because you learned a lot. It’s hard to stay at it if you don’t see that you’re getting something out of it intrinsically.

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Sophie is a Legal Community Reporter on LexBlog’s Publishing team where she creates, edits, and shares content about the network’s members through multiple mediums, including blog posts, videos, and podcasts. She is passionate about tenants’ rights, specifically in New York City, and has

Sophie is a Legal Community Reporter on LexBlog’s Publishing team where she creates, edits, and shares content about the network’s members through multiple mediums, including blog posts, videos, and podcasts. She is passionate about tenants’ rights, specifically in New York City, and has written about the issue on her personal blog, The Price of Presence. Currently living in the Bronx, Sophie will soon be moving to Manhattan and attending Fordham Law School in Fall 2021.