Media Credit: Jarod Opperman Alexander Theoharis is a founding member and editor in chief of TheLegality.com, a website that combines a law journal and a blog. Maintained solely by University law students, the website posts weekly articles meant to provide an interesting and insightful legal opinion on popular topics.

Blogs can do many things, from providing windows into our everyday lives to keeping us up-to-date with the latest tech-gadgets.

The students and professors of the University of Oregon law school use blogs for many different reasons as well, ranging from the lives of law school students to providing easy-to-digest legal briefs.

Started in October 2006, Life at Law is the official blog of the students at the law school. Seven students from different backgrounds all contribute to the blog, which gives people a look at what it's like being a law student at the University.

Posts on Life at Law range from summaries of conferences that law school students have been to, to personal blogs about the experience of starting senior year at the law school. The contributing students range from first-year law students to graduating seniors.

The students of the law school do more than blog about their daily lives, however. One group of students has taken the idea of a blog and altered it to create a new kind of law journal.

TheLegality.com is a completely different type of student blog. In fact, it's not a blog at all. Founded earlier this year, The Legality was started by nine University law school students. The website is a hybrid between a blog and law journal.

It uses the architecture of a blog but publishes one article a week, every Tuesday. The staff takes a popular legal topic, ranging from same-sex marriage to television censorship, and explains them in articles that reveal the law behind the topic in layman's terms, making it accessible to anyone.

"Law journals can take months, sometimes years to publish," Alexander Theoharis, founding member and editor in chief of The Legality, said. "We saw a lot of misinformation out there. You have people who only hear one side's take on an issue - one that isn't necessarily right from a legal standpoint. We created The Legality as a way to explain the legal matters behind popular events."

The Legality has been picked up by news aggregator websites like Digg.com, Fark.com and Boingboing.net.

"Fark was actually the biggest; it crashed our server almost immediately," Theoharis said. Fark linked to The Legality's article on the battle between Facebook's Scrabulous application, which mimics the board game Scrabble, and Hasbro, the company that owns the rights to the board game.

The Legality site is gaining popularity as well. They recently increased their staff from nine students to 28 in order to better handle the site's increased traffic.

The students at the law school aren't the only ones in touch with the blogosphere, either. Michael Moffitt and Susan Gary, both professors at the law school, are members of the Law Professor Blog Network. Moffitt is a contributor at Indisputably.org, an alternative dispute resolution blog, and Gary is a contributing editor at the Nonprofit Law Prof Blog.

The blogs of the University's School of Law are examples of how students and professors have adapted to the rise of the blog and are cutting-edge examples of the way new media are affecting people at the University of Oregon.

news@dailyemerald.com

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