The Volokh Conspiracy

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Concurring Opinions Signs Off

The once-great group law blog is ending its run.

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Concurring Opinions, one of the popular general law professor group blogs that I read daily for years, has decided to close up shop. This isn't a big surprise, as the once-vibrant group blog hadn't had much content recently.

I'm reminded of Matt Bodie's question in 2005 about what the future of law blogs would be—a question asked, ironically, in response to the fouding of Concurring Opinions:

We still seem to be in the early stages of the blogosphere. But I'm wondering, particularly with respect to law blogs, what the future holds. Here are a few possibilities as to directions we'll take in the future.
1. We're in the "Far and Away" land rush phase, and pretty soon the continent will be filled up.
2. We're in the early Internet Boom phase, and a big shakeup is coming down the pike.
3. Blogging is a transitional technology that will lead to new forms of connectivity and creativity. Current bloggers will lead the way to these new formats.

I had some predictions of my own on this in 2005, too.

I'm not entirely sure how to best describe what that future has become, although there does seem to be less interest in blogging among law professors these days. Part of that may be the rise of Twitter. And part of it may be that blogging didn't bring the career payoffs that a lot of law professors thought it would when the "blogosphere" was young, at least relative to the time it took.