What Real Lawyers Have Blogs Means by Legal Bloggers Not Citing Each Other

Updated

Kevin O'Keefe's post "Legal Bloggers Don't Cite. Inclusion in a Citation System for Secondary Law Could Be a Start." describes a specific, narrow problem: legal bloggers rarely hyperlink to each other's posts, even when they are responding to or building on another blogger's work. The complaint is not that bloggers ignore statutes or cases — it is that they ignore each other. Carolyn Elefant, quoted in the post, calls the failure to hyperlink "my biggest pet peeve" after 23 years of blogging, and O'Keefe agrees that "legal bloggers do a poor job of linking — at least as to each other's publishing, if not to the law."

The distinction the post is drawing

The headline can be read two ways, so it is worth separating them:

  • Citing the law — linking to a statute, regulation, or case. O'Keefe concedes this happens at least sometimes.
  • Citing other bloggers — linking to a fellow practitioner's post that prompted your own, or that supports your point. This is what he says is largely missing.

The post's argument lives in the second category. The discussion began on LinkedIn, where Elefant asked O'Keefe directly what he thought about the "common practice of not hyperlinking by most bloggers."

Why the missing links matter

A link between two blog posts does three things that a bare assertion does not:

  1. It credits the source of an idea. Without a link, a reader cannot tell whether a point originated with the blogger or was borrowed from someone else.
  2. It makes the conversation traceable. If Blogger A responds to Blogger B without linking, a reader arriving at A's post has no path back to the original argument.
  3. It builds a body of secondary literature. O'Keefe's proposed remedy — bringing legal blogs into a citation system for secondary law — only works if posts reference one another in the first place. A citation system needs citations to index.

The practical consequence is discoverability. A post that links out to related commentary sits inside a network; a post that does not is an isolated page.

The proposed fix, and its precondition

O'Keefe's suggestion is that legal blogging be included in a citation system for secondary legal literature — the kind of apparatus that already tracks treatises, law review articles, and similar secondary sources. That would give legal blog posts a formal place in the chain of authority that lawyers and researchers already follow.

The precondition is obvious from the rest of the post: such a system can only be built on posts that cite each other. If bloggers do not link, there is nothing for a citation system to capture. That is why the post frames the citation-system idea as "a start" rather than a solution — the linking habit has to exist before the infrastructure is worth building.

What this means if you blog about law

The takeaway is a habit, not a platform change. When you write a post that responds to, disagrees with, or extends another lawyer's published commentary, link to that post by name. The same applies when you rely on a colleague's analysis rather than a primary source. O'Keefe's point is that this is normal practice in other writing communities and conspicuously absent in legal blogging — and that fixing it is a prerequisite for legal blogs being treated as citable secondary literature at all.