The Wiki-Treatise?

Dan's post below discusses the launch of an online "pocket part" to the Yale Law Journal, and links it to questions about the future of blogging and scholarship.  This calls to mind my earlier post on Professor Tribe's decision not to continue with a second volume to the third edition of his treatise, in large measure because "no treatise, in any sense of the term, can be true to this moment in our constitutional history -- to its conflicts, innovations, and complexities."  (I sent Professor Tribe a copy of my post, and he recently sent me a very gracious response.) 

But the blogosphere, or cognate aspects of the Internet, suggest that at least one treatise, in some sense of the term, could respond to the shifting and uncertain constitutional terrain on which Tribe suggests we stand at this moment.  Consider Wikipedia, an effort to create an online encyclopedia that "can be visited and edited by anyone at any time."  Is not such an effort possible and sustainable for constitutional law, or other legal fields?  It seems to me it would be worthwhile to launch a project in which constitutional law scholars collaborated on a treatise online, in which scholars could edit and comment on one another's work, use the Wiki format or hyperlinks to attack various issues from a variety of theoretical and interpretive perspectives, and respond to changes in the law in real time.  Morris Zapp, in David Lodge's wonderful academic satire Changing Places, dreams of a comprehensive work that would examine Jane Austen's work so thoroughly from various critical perspectives that it would render further scholarship on Austen impossible.  The Wiki-treatise would offer some possibility of providing that encyclopedic perspective -- but, given the changing nature of constitutional law and the addition of new materials, without stopping constitutional scholarship in its tracks.  Nor, of course, is constitutional law the only field that could adopt such a project.  Why should the Restatements have the corner on defining and shaping a given legal field, when the same project might be undertaken far more swiftly and efficiently online?

I think this is more than a blue-sky project; it's feasible and valuable, and might even draw in folks like Tribe, who are eager to synthesize a corpus of law but don't feel such a project is sustainable as an individual work or timely enough if committed to print.  And the prospect of the Wiki-treatise also suggests that, while we legal scholar/bloggers have often wondered aloud how blogging might enrich legal scholarship, we are still far from making the most and best use of the traits of the blogosphere in legal scholarship.  Thus far we use the blogosphere to respond to real-time developments in short bits, without fully using the blogosphere and its collaborative possibilities to create weighty and substantial, yet mutable and flexible, scholarship.  But there are ways to do so -- if we show the ambition and initative, and if law schools offer some incentive to do so by recognizing the value of serious online scholarship.