Recently in Weblogs Category

According to Sitemeter, I get a small, but consistent, number of people finding this page on google searches for the words "slut of boron." I can't even fathom what that could be about. I looked for the phrase myself and found no clues as to what they could be searching for. Any ideas?

. . . And of course, now that I've used the phrase here I will only get more people finding this page by looking for boron sluts. So if one of you who does get here through such a search doesn't mind explaining in comments, I'd be delighted. Well, probably not delighted, but edified at least.

Since it seems to be in the air, I thought I'd formally articulate my relatively fast-and-loose comment policy. These are fluid standards, not hard and fast rules, for those who care about Rule of Law jargon.

1. Comment spam gets deleted. That hardly even bears mentioning.

2. Comments on recent posts are allowed by default. If I read a comment and find it hateful, offensive, counter-productive, spiteful, or otherwise useless I will probably delete it. If you find your comments getting deleted multiple times, you may be on the road to having your IP banned from commenting.

3. Where others have commented on a comment otherwise bound for deletion, disemvowelling is preferred. This preserves the meaning of the original comment and its derivative comments for those who wish to decipher ir. For those who don't, it can be taken as a signpost reading "Here there be trollage!"

4. Everyone makes mistakes. If you put a comment up, whether trollish or not, that you subsequently find embarrasing feel free to contact me about it. I'll have to weigh how deleting the comment would fit in with the what remains of the conversation, but chances are I'll remove it.

5. Similarly, I reserve the right to delete my own comments and posts wholesale. Generally this means switching a post to draft status, meaning the conversation is preserved but no longer public. If circumstances change and cause me to think better of a post's removal, I may bring it back.

6. When posts get old, the commenting burden shifts. This blog is configured to automatically put any comment on a post greater than two weeks old into moderation, since spambots tend to hit older posts. However, since new comments show up on my sidebar, a comment on an old thread will draw that old post to the fore again. Thus: At the two-weeks-old mark, the burden shifts. For posts younger than two weeks, the default is that comments will be accepted and only extraordinarily bad comments will be deleted. After two weeks the default is that a comment will be deleted unless it compellingly adds to the post in a manner that causes me to want to open that discussion again. So don't feel offended that, for instance, I don't want to discuss abortion on Gilmore Girls or words that end in "-trix" anymore.

That should be everything. As always, I reserve the right to bend any of the rules as necessity requires and to amend these rules on a whim.

Strike up the band, as it were!

Man, this week without comments has caused me to really wonder how people with comment-less blogs do it. I've had all sorts of bloggish ideas in the last week or so (speaking of which, I just lost the game again. Nuts) but it's been hard to motivate myself to post about them when I know there's no possibility of feedback. So how do the Instapundits, Barely Legals, and Leiter Reports manage to inspire themselves to keep post volume at rate they do?

I finally got around to some housekeeping with respect to the links on the sideboard. For starters, I finally fixed Helen's URL. I've also changed the Sites I Read Daily to reflect the sites I actually read daily. I've taken off a bunch that I don't find myself reading much anymore (not that they're bad, but I just don't find myself as interested in them lately). Most prominently, I've added four at the top, Pandagon, Echidne of the Snakes, Shakespeare's Sister, and Feministe. They're all very well done feminism-oriented blogs. They're the major impetus for this housekeeping; for the last few months I've spent the majority of my internet time reading those sites, and it seemed odd not to have a link to them.

So, read! Enjoy!

Typepad's a bit wonky about comments. A lot of times it'll sit and load for a long time after you hit Post. Just try hitting reload when this hapens and chances are you'll find your comment has been added to the post. Just to be safe, you should highlight the text of your post and hit Copy, so that if it doesn't show up you can Paste it back into the comment box and try posting again. If, while waiting, you hit Post a second time, there's a good chance you'll end up double-posting.

My policy on double-posts is that I'll go through and delete them right away when I see them. There's no need to point it out. I'll also delete any comments telling me "Hey! I double posted!" assuming there's no other content to the comment; that way the comment section doesn't end up with you saying "Hey! I double posted!" but there's no second post anymore because I deleted it. I'm just telling you this so that noone accuses me of censorship or anything. I'm just tending the garden.

I've been toying for the last few days with the idea of a radical shift for this weblog. It would mean far, far more posting, but a change in the contents of those posts, and I'm interested to see what people think.

You see, I've been falling way behind in taking notes on cases ("briefing" cases as we say for some reason). A large part of the reason for this is that I spend a lot of time writing posts for this blog, checking others weblogs, etc. At the same time, I noticed yesterday that the cases I feel most confident in my knowledge of are the cases that I've posted about on here. So the thought occurs: why not do my note-taking on my weblog? I can make a post about every case I read, and thereby force myself to put the mental energy into thinking hard about the case while simultaneously giving me a written record of my thoughts.

There are a couple of problems with this. First, I may be putting the cart before the horse with respect to previously posted cases. That is, there's a strong change that I posted about them because they interested me, and therefore I thought about them and now understand them, rather than that I understand them now because I posted about them. Still, it's unlikely, in this regard, that posting will be any less effective than any other form of notetaking.

The much larger concern is for you, the audience. I worry that if I start case blogging I'll be breaking the first rule of weblogging, to always write for an audience (at least, for an audience larger than yourself). While theoretically these cases are all chosen for inclusion in their respective casebooks because they elaborate a point of law, or because, when viewed next to another case, they illuminate an intriguing contradiction, I know that there's a massive, massive difference in the level of interest to the outsider between "Cases about how much doctors must compensate accidental mothers for botched sterilizations" and "Cases about whether or not a judge levied an improperly high sanction against a company for failure to send the appropriate attorney to a pre-trial conference." Of course, handily there's a pretty high correlation between "Cases which are arm-clawingly boring" and "Cases we read for Civil Procedure," so in that sense I may be able to warn you off.

The related problem is that I read a lot of cases, which means a lot of posting. Now, time-wise this shouldn't be a problem; I ought to be taking notes anyway and, again, taking notes. if done right, should take no less time than posting about these cases. I have three classes, and each assigns 2-3 cases per night. So that means between 6 and 9 posts per day, all about cases. I'll try to keep up the same level of non-law posts, about a post or two per day, but they're guaranteed to be swamped by case posts.

Now, I'll still be posting for an audience; this isn't just going to be a notebook that happens to be on-line. I'll try to draw out whatever point of law caused the editor to put the case into the casebook and try to make it interesting, and leave the case open for discussion in comments. I'm not going to expect comments on all cases, or any for that matter, but it would probably help me understand the cases better if there were occasional discussions on them. I'm also going to clearly demarcate the case posts from the regular posts, both in the categories and in the post titles, so as to make it much easier to get to the non-law posts.

Anyhow, those are my thoughts. I'm thinking of trying it over the next week, then seeing where I am on Friday. Any thoughts or feelings on this?

Sorry to do a post about random people who've come here by google searches, but...

I've finally got enough stuff on this page that I'm starting to get random people coming here from Google, and I'm pretty sure none of what I have is actually helpful to them. Sadly, no lawyer porn searches yet (not even law student porn searches!) Mostly I get people looking for cases that I mention. Someone came here looking for Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council. There was a random, off-handed mention of the case in my "Lord what tools these mortals be" post about a month ago, and the only reason they ended up here was because they searched for the exact phrase "Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council" when there ought to be a "Corporation" after "Chevron."

Yesterday someone came here looking for "Harkonnen Heartplug." This opens an avenue for a question that's vaguely bugged me for a while. The Harkonnen heartplugs: Were they actually in the novel, or are they a David Lynch innovation? I remember watching the movie some time after I'd read the book and couldn't recall heartplugs being mentioned by Frank Herbert, but I wasn't entirely sure.

Finally, someone came here looking for "Lucy v. Zehmer copy of case brief." Fair enough; I actually did talk a bit about Lucy v. Zehmer. Then at 5:30 this morning I got another hit from Google Translations of someone translating my Lucy v. Zehmer post into French. Huh. It'll be interesting to see if I show up in any French treatises on the common law. "Noted expert on contracts made in jest that are actually enforeceable Molten Boron..."

Well, now I have two ideas for posts, but both are relatively longish legal posts that will require more mental energy than I can summon at the moment, given that I am functioning on 4 hours sleep. So, while I take a nap, I'm interested to know which of the two topics you would prefer to hear about sooner, and which you'd prefer to delay until later: 1. Legal issues with respect to BDSM in California, or 2. Questions of compensation in "Wrongful Life" suits (suits in which a doctor botches a sterilization procedure, resulting in pregnancy). Of those two, which tickles your fancy?