The Great Change: Turning Cathy into a Lawyer

Lincoln Caplan has been lamenting how law blogs tend to be rarefied things, written by law practitioners for other law practitioners (be they students, faculty, or lawyers, etc.).

Orin Kerr isn't sure what the fuss is about. Blogs are individual things, and people can use them however they want to. True enough. But there's something to be said for writing blawgs that are accessible to a wider audience. To a certain extent some legal analyses might end up being more directed towards those "in the know," because they'll have the right tools to be able to understand some of the nuances. But perhaps those occasions are more rare than we would think, and if blawgers wrote with the understanding and expectation that others could learn from our posts we'd be able to reach a wider audience and consequently our writings would have a greater effect. It's a fine line between law and policy, and therefore politics, and those belong to everyone.

Me, I hope I write in a fairly egalitarian way. I make no apologies for my vocabulary - I don't think writing for non-lawyers requires dumbing down one's writing - but I try not to presume too much on the part of my readers, or worse, make the non-lawyer readers feel somehow left out of the discussion. Much as I'd like to have the esteem of the legal profession, I don't want to earn it at the expense of having greater influence at large. I actually relish the role of being a translator, of making the law meaningful and relevant to all sorts of people. It seems that lawyers are often regarded as alchemists, people with some sort of special power to navigate these mysterious forces that govern our lives. I think that's a shame, and plan to do my part to pull back the curtain so everyone can see how the system works and their part in shaping it.