Mon, Jul. 09, 2007

What German Law Bloggers Read

CK - Washington.   Many German courts do not publish decisions as quickly as courts do here. Surprisingly, many law bloggers in Germany pull their news and content from TV, magazines and dailies, but not from the often more detailed press releases that courts publish fairly promptly.

There are notable exceptions to this trend, such as LobbyBlog, Berlin Blawg, Recht & Alltag, Markenblog, on trademarks, and Transblawg, on legal translations. Human interest perspectives make up a good deal of content and will help their authors when they are ready for auto-biographies. Others, such as Jurabilis! with its air of sophistication, typify the copy & paste culture.

To help avoid repeatedly pasted content, the indispensible Jurablogs metablog offers German law bloggers its press section. The section indicates that blogging lawyers reference, or parrot, material predominantly from Stern, Spiegel, Frankfurter Allgemeine, Heute, Netzeitung, Süddeutsche, Welt, Tagesschau, Heise, Financial Times and Handelsblatt.

When it comes to American law, law bloggers in Germany often recycle material compiled by journalists, not lawyers, instead of analyzing original sources. Unchallenged, many law blogs perpetuate unverified myths that result from often hastily packaged secondary sources. Building on Goethe's black on white credo in Faust I, 4, 42, they don't merely carry home in comfort material designed to justify screaming headlines, they republish it as truth, or worse, as the law of the United States.


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