Professor Helge Årsheim (University of Oslo) writes to me with news of a very good new blog, Religion Going Public. The blog’s focus is primarily on religion, culture, and politics in Norway, Scandinavia, and Europe, with a very interesting group of contributors.
Welcome to the blogosphere, and check it out!
This is rather silly. Inside Higher Ed reports that the International Studies Association–according to its website, “the most respected and widely known scholarly association dedicated to international studies”–has proposed a ban on personal blogging by editors of its journals. The proposal would allow editors to blog only at official sites affiliated with their journals. The ISA’s President says the association is concerned about the lack of professionalism at many academic blogs and that it doesn’t want readers to confuse editors’ personal posts with the association’s official products.
Maybe international studies blogs tend to tackiness, I don’t know. But I can’t see how a scholarly association would think to ban personal blogging in the year 2014. Leave aside for the moment concerns about academic freedom. Blogs serve a useful academic function. Sure, blogs aren’t the same thing as long-form scholarship; a writer can’t fully develop ideas in the blogging format. But blogs allow scholars to carry on helpful conversations with colleagues across the world and to engage the wider public as well. They can highlight current issues that merit further study. And blogs can be equalizers for scholars from smaller and less well-known institutions. Scholars who would never be asked on PBS’s News Hour can use blogs as a way to get their ideas out and influence debate. It would be wrong to lose these benefits because of a vague concern about professionalism. If the ISA is having trouble with editors who post childish comments on personal blogs–apparently, this is one of the reasons the association has proposed the ban–it ought to speak to those editors directly, rather than adopt a blanket prohibition. (H/T: Instapundit).
Over at the Liberty Law Blog, John McGinnis (Northwestern) is doing a very interesting series on Harold Berman’s seminal two-volume history of Western law, Law and Revolution. In Law and Revolution, Berman argued that the existence of competing jurisdictions, each with a valid claim on people’s loyalties, has played an essential role in Western law, going all the way back to the 11th-century investiture crisis, which dealt in part with the competing jurisdictions of canon and royal courts. In this post, McGinnis argues that legal polycentrism of the sort Berman describes can promote liberty by preventing governmental monopolies. Classical American federalism, for example, promotes liberty by dividing power between state and federal sovereigns. McGinnis wonders, though, whether federalism can do the job today, now that states claim relatively little loyalty from their citizens. Check out the whole series.
Some students at Emory have started an interesting-looking new blog, Where Law and Religion Meet. The blog, which is associated with Emory’s fantastic Center for the Study of Law and Religion, has posts on law and religion news and scholarship, including book reviews. Check it out.
Here’s an interesting new podcast series: Dialogues on Law and Justice. The series is produced by Mars Hill Audio, an independent organization in the 
Reformed/Calvinist tradition that seeks to engage contemporary culture. So far, the series has included interviews with a number of prominent scholars, including Carl Esbeck (Missouri) on Hosanna-Tabor, John Witte (Emory) on the relationship between secular and religious jurisprudence, Michael McConnell (Stanford) on the Court’s reduction of First Amendment claims to free speech claims, and Robert George (Princeton) on marriage. This looks to be a great resource.