This is the second in an occassional series in which we here at Footnoted force already-busy academic bloggers to answer a bunch of questions. This week’s victim is Eugene Volokh of the Volokh Conspiracy, a “collaborative weblog providing analysis of developments in the U.S. legal system and courts, as well as of recent news and events.”

1. So … why do you blog?

I’m an academic, so I care about publicizing my ideas. Naturally, the core of my work is still coming up with new ideas and publicizing them to fellow scholars. But I’d also like to convey them in more popularized ways to the public, both lawyers and laypeople. That’s why I’ve long written op-eds and talked to journalists, and that’s why I now also blog.

2. How much time do you spend blogging each day?

Varies, from none to three or so hours, with the average likely being 30 minutes or so. It helps to have a group blog, so that I can take time off when I need to without worrying that posts will stop appearing, and readers will therefore stop coming.

3. Do you have a recent favorite post (of your own)?

Sorry, I don’t really have things organized this way in my head. My favorite series of posts has been the 2003 series on “the myth of the median hyper-promiscuous gay male.” Perhaps I especially like them because they are the rare posts that actually uncover relatively original information, rather than just publicizing what is pretty well-rehearsed in the academic literature.

4. How does blogging affect your research/teaching? Or does it?

I often use the blog as a research tool; for instance, while writing my “Crime-Facilitating Speech” article, (Stanford Law Review, 2005), I needed to find novels that described nonobvious ways of committing crimes. That’s a hard list to come up with, so I decided to ask my readers. Sure enough, they sent in dozens of e-mails, many of which pointed to precisely the sort of novels I was looking for.

5. What academic blogs do you read regularly?

Several, but let me mention the one nonobvious one — a blog written not by law professors but by linguists: Language Log.

6. Tell us something we probably don’t know.

Scholarly legal articles cite blog posts with some regularity, much as they cite op-eds, working papers, and articles. The Sentencing Law & Policy blog, for instance, has been cited over 200 times. Our own posts have been cited over 100 times; posts on Jack Balkin’s group blog, Balkinization, has been cited nearly 100 times.