Wednesday, November 14, 2007

Scholars and Practitioners

Anne Reed has a great post up at Deliberations on the role that blogs have played in opening the communication channels between legal scholars and legal practitioners, bridging a gap that is only now starting to reach its full potential. Blogs take hits because they have partisan or egocentric reputations, but that gap between academe and practice is real and any means to fill it in is valuable. I think we still have too much of a gap on the corrections sentencing side of it. The legal scholars are amazingly open to the exchanges, but the rest of corr sent academe, like the criminologists and policy scholars, are noticeably lacking, despite the best efforts of the folks at Voir Dire. The practitioners, too, on our side are conspicuous by their absence, as they say. There's no good excuse for the academics, especially those who have tenure, not to participate in these exchanges, but I think we'll have a problem drawing practitioners in. I have several regular contributors of links who don't blog or comment because they are concerned about their jobs or reprimands, and that's something we need to figure out how to overcome. The communication has to be two-way, as Anne notes, so does anyone have any ideas about how we can get and protect the practitioner side of that blog conversation?

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