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