I highly recommend subscribing to Dan Lewis’s daily Now I Know email, a labor of love, compendium of neat stories, and marvel of the Internet. Dan guestblogged for us in the early days as a first-year law student on stories, often sports-related, that included a National League umpire who sued after quitting his job and not being taken back, Deion Sanders’s face-off with the car repair guy, and shop owners criminally charged in Canada for fighting off a burglar. [archive / NowIKnow and personal Twitter]

Guestbloggers have sometimes brought a scholarly and research perspective, as with Michael DeBow, a law professor at Cumberland School of Law at Samford University in Birmingham, Ala. He wrote (presciently!) about a Massachusetts attorney general’s ventures into outsourced enforcement and how it wound up sluicing money to some ideologically engaged private outfits; the importance in comparative international development of secure property rights; and Alabama’s fitful progress toward being less of a “judicial hellhole” for defendant corporations than it once was. [archive]

James Maxeiner teaches at the University of Baltimore School of Law and has practiced and written extensively in legal matters in both American and German courts. The German system of civil litigation, which includes the loser-pays principle, is often compared favorably with our own. His insight into the comparative performance of the two systems of law helped inform posts on what foreign clients say about American law, how Germany does civil legal aid, and some mild puffery from the German justice ministry about the advantage of its version of continental law. [archive]

Filed under: best of, Germany, guestbloggers