Ian Best, a third-year law student at Ohio State University, has just completed a Taxonomy of American and Canadian Legal Blogs, entitled 3L Epiphany, as part of a”blog-for-credit” Independent Study project.

I created 3L Epiphany primarily to study the growing phenomenon of legal blogs, the weblogs of lawyers, law professors, and law students. I have three main purposes in mind:

First, 3L Epiphany will be a typical, personal blog where I can learn the practical aspects of blogging. I believe that the skills which I learn from this endeavor will be marketable ones, since blogging is becoming more prevalent in the legal community.

Second, 3L Epiphany will demonstrate the potential uses of a law student blog as a research tool. I believe that blogging can provide an entirely new technique for conducting and displaying legal scholarship.

Third, 3L Epiphany will provide a comprehensive taxonomy of legal blogs as an online service to the legal profession. I believe that the blogosphere suffers from a lack of an efficient infrastructure. 3L Epiphany will exemplify a cohesive system for organizing legal blogs.

Forget all those blogrolls and listings elsewhere; this impressive project looks like the definitive listing of the several hundred North American law blogs.