In an article for Law.com on legal blogging (”How to Build a Better Law Blog”, Dec. 8) C.C. Holland is kind enough to quote me and discuss this site:
…Walter Olson imagined that his Overlawyered blog would pull an audience of his friends and acquaintances and a cadre of legal policy wonks.
“But you don’t know who your audience really is until you start writing and find out,” he notes. “My readership has a large following among lawyers, but I’ve been surprised to find that a lot of doctors are reading it, as are a lot of people from other countries.” …
Olson, who has been writing Overlawyered since July 1, 1999, knows a thing or two about longevity. His blog is widely considered to be the oldest legal blog and is also one of the most popular, regularly surpassing 9,000 unique daily visitors.
“People who force themselves to blog, it’s a sad spectacle,” he says. “You can tell reading it that it’s painful to them.” The key is to find a topic that will sustain you. “You have to think, ‘Boy, there’s so much to write about I can’t imagine getting tired of it anytime soon,’” he says.
And I still can’t.
Tagged as:
about the site,
accolades,
Walter Olson
I’ve got an op-ed in today’s L.A. Times (Walter Olson, “Slavery reparations: what happened?”, Oct. 31) based on a longer article forthcoming in City Journal. (The short answer to what happened: 9/11, public opinion, and the courts.)
The City Journal article is in turn a much condensed version of a draft chapter in my book-in-progress about the influence of the law schools. As I show in that chapter, there were few places where reparations enthusiasm burned hotter than in legal academia, with conferences and law review articles galore devoted to advancing the cause. The most prominent law school advocate of the reparations cause back then, Harvard’s Charles Ogletree, is back in the news these days because of his role as mentor (and, reportedly, chief advisor on racial issues) to Democratic candidate Barack Obama; he’s being mentioned as a possible civil rights chief in the next administration. Not surprisingly, Ogletree has had much less to say about the reparations cause this year than he did eight or nine years ago; I have a feeling that in an Obama administration he’d be under strict orders not to get near the issue, but of course I could be wrong.
We’ve covered reparations litigation extensively at Overlawyered.
Tagged as:
Barack Obama,
Harvard,
law schools,
reparations,
Walter Olson
Off-topic, I add to the punditocracy’s surfeit of blather on the Connecticut Senate election at National Review Online.
One thing I didn’t mention in the article that is on topic for this site is that Lieberman is one of the few prominent federal Democrats still in office that is generally willing to stand up to the trial bar. If Lamont does supplant Lieberman, the trial-lawyer takeover of the Democratic party (commented on a year ago by Walter) will be all but complete.
Update: Walter reminds me of his 2000 Wall Street Journal op-ed on Lieberman’s record on liability reform.
Tagged as:
Connecticut,
Democrats in dissent,
Joe Lieberman,
politics,
Ted Frank,
Walter Olson
