Longtime reader Jim Dedman reminds us of what this blog looked like in 1999:

Requiescat in pace, @Overlawyered (1999 – 2020). Thanks again for everything, @WalterOlson! pic.twitter.com/1UDw7WUCKh

— Jim Dedman (@JimDedman) May 21, 2020

As I noted when the blog turned 20:

Internet Archive’s first snapshot of the front page was taken Oct. 7, 1999, and featured the pink-and-grey color scheme that the site was to retain for many years. (Plus a webring — does anyone remember those? — an articles library, a discussion forum other than comments, and many other features since discontinued.) You can see the archives for the first half of July 1999 in Internet Archive form here.

In the site’s early years, there was no blogging software, which meant I hand-inserted every link one by one with HTML (I think Glenn Reynolds once described this method as “baked on clay tablets”). I had to make design decisions pretty much from scratch too. This resulted in a lot of homemade effects, from typeface choices to that notorious pink and gray color scheme, which was widely disliked but did make the site distinctive. Later, I moved the site onto the Movable Type and eventually WordPress blogging systems. In time, skillfully designed themes and templates became available that gave it a more professional look.

I tried to make the site a reasonably early adopter of technical innovations, but many of those were blind alleys. For example, before tags came along I lavished an inordinate amount of effort on something called categories. Blogrolls were a big social thing and source of traffic — we still have one, frozen in amber — until eventually they weren’t, after more people had begun to discover sites like ours through search and social media.

When the Cato Institute began publishing the site 10 years ago, it took over the back-end functions to my immense gratitude (thanks, Jeremy Kolassa and colleagues). This made a difference especially when WordPress would upgrade to a new version, something that used to absorb several days’ worth of my attention and often went wrong owing to my inadequacies as a techie.

One consistent theme over these nearly 21 years is the importance I’ve placed on the site’s archives. They were often the jumping-off point for my own later research into a topic, and I knew they reached a lot of journalists and scholars who would stumble across our coverage of some legal controversy from five or fifteen years earlier. Making the archives something intelligible and usable, rather than a mere jumble, could pose a special challenge whenever software upgrades altered the presentation of the site. One of the questions I’ve gotten most often in recent days is whether the archives will stay up, and I have confidence that Cato will do an excellent job on that.

Here’s another image (click to enlarge) of what the top of the site’s front page looked like in late 1999:

Longtime and other readers are welcome to share recollections of how the site used to look and work.

Filed under: about the site

Dear friends and Overlawyered readers:

I’ve been considering ceasing publication of Overlawyered over the past couple of years, and the time has finally arrived. I plan to publish its final post on May 31, ten days from now.

That will leave the site just one month short of a remarkable 21-year run. That makes it the longest-running general interest law blog anyone has been able to identify. It’s one of the monuments still standing from the heyday of individual blogging on current events and public policy, a sector that bloomed after 9/11 two years into our run.

It has been a pleasure beyond compare to write it. But blogs that publish every day (and with only a few exceptions, that is what Overlawyered has managed to do for all these years) are extraordinarily time-intensive for a single author, and my time is constrained.

Be assured (if you count this as assurance!) that I am not going anywhere. I look forward to continuing my writing as a Cato senior fellow both at the excellent multi-contributor blog Cato at Liberty and at many other outlets. One reason I’m making this decision is that I’m eager to step up the pace of this other writing at a time rich in policy challenges.

Even in its early years Overlawyered had a much broader range of interests than its name might imply. It covered (and still does cover) wacky lawsuits as well as the more serious side of litigation policy but also many areas of writing interest of mine such as free speech and business regulation. Especially since it came to Cato ten years ago, it has continued to branch out into such areas as constitutional law, criminal justice policy, and state and local policy. But at heart it has always been a blog about law in America.

I’ll have more to say in coming days to recognize and thank the site’s community of readers, contributors, and guestbloggers, to talk matters of transition and what will live on in what forms (I expect the archives to be fully available for the indefinite future, thanks Cato), to reminisce, and also to do a bit of regular blog posting as the impulse strikes. Just this once, I’m leaving comments closed on this post, but they will be open on a nearby related post.

Filed under: about the site