The Great Change: Turning Cathy into a Lawyer

In the fall I will begin law school. With several friends who have already gone through it, and having also talked to some lawyers and researched law schools, I've come to learn that the law school regimen is designed to change how one thinks generally, and particularly about the law. I am curious about how this transformation will affect me, so I decided to blog so that I could track the process.

It seems a pity that it should require a JD to truly understand the American legal system. Average citizens clearly have a sense of how things work, but from what I've observed of lawyers and law students, it seems that what people in general think about how the law works and how it actually works are frequently not the same.

Right now I am still a layman. I have my sense of how things *should* be, and I want to blog my experience to see how my perspective changes as I find out how things are. Maybe to some extent my idealized perspective and reality are the same. I suspect that frequently the opposite will be true. I wonder if I will somehow be converted into seeing the "rightness" of how things actually are, or if I will resist and continue to think that the idealized version is better. Probably all of the above.

In the meantime, I have several months before I begin law school (at a school to be named later). My consciousness has already been raised regarding certain legal issues (which is what movitivated me to pursue becoming a lawyer). Over the summer I suspect I will want to comment on those issues. Such blogging not only gives me a soapbox but also provides a benchmark for my legal sensibilities as a layman.

I suppose there's no point in writing in great depth right now about who I am. I'm sure plenty of details will leak out as I write. I will probably also post about non-law related things in my life. Just because they are interesting, and because they make me me. And who I am now probably will make a significant difference in who I am once I'm done with school.

(Though for a quick snapshot about who I am, you might want to visit my homepage.)

I sought some advice yesterday on strategies for my job search. In the course of the counseling session it was strongly recommended I remove the links to my blog and homepage from my resume. I was told that they would be perceived by many firms to demonstrate "a lack of judgment."

It was explained that law firms want cookie-cutter candidates who will fit into the firm indistinctively and march lockstep. They don't want to risk hiring someone who may be different. So here I thought that the blog helped differentiate me from the crowd, and now I learn that yes, yes it does, but that's apparently not a good thing.

I recognize that many blogs out there are full of asinine self-absorbed sub-literate drivel, and this may be what the firms fear when they hear of a blog. But, if I may be so bold to say, mine clearly isn't, and anyone who takes a moment to read it can immediately tell. The automatic suspicion a firm might have about me because I have publicly - and proudly - expressed myself is as irrationally based as, well, evaluating my entire potential worth as a lawyer based on arbitrary grades from a couple hours' worth of otherwise inconsequential exams. Or, to explain the dysfunction by another analogy, to automatically disqualify the first grader who cried on his first day of school for any eventual college financing on the assumption he's never going to be up to the scholarship required. It's pre-emptive, it's presumptive, it's superficial, it's wrong.

With the blog I've been regularly writing and publishing on substantive topics for almost a year and a half. I would have thought such effort would be seen as a tremendous asset, suggesting that I take the craft of writing seriously, that I have a sense of commitment and follow-through, and that I'm trying to develop more sophisticated thinking on legal issues, among other positive things. I would have thought these attributes to be good ones for a lawyer to have. But, then again, what do I know - I'm still a layman.

So now I get to decide what to do. At first it seems there is a simple solution, to just take the blog reference off the resume while surreptitiously continuing to blog anyway. But such a course of action is hardly innocuous. True, on a resume it's all about image and how you present yourself. It's clearly not the time for the thorough abject candor about yourself you'd share with your best friend. But what's also true about resumes is that truth is important, and suppressing the blog, something that has become so entwined with my identity as a person and a developing legal professional, something I'm more proud of than almost anything else I've done, seems like a lie, a lie I'd be telling just to get a firm to like me. It's like an afterschool special gone horribly awry, where the sage advice in fact turns out to be to wear the same clothes the popular girls wear so you can be part of their clique. That kind of conformity isn't right for 11 year olds, and it's not right for me.

Meanwhile the tacit message seems to be that according to Big Firms I should somehow be ashamed of what I've expressed, and I find this disturbing and anathema to any values I'd hoped to develop when I chose to pursue this field. The counselor said that in the end it was up to me, that I can choose to do things more conventionally, or I can do things my way and proudly fly my blog banner if that's really what I felt was important, which I do. But I'd need to understand that it shrinks my universe of possibilities of potential firms to work for. Still, my gut feeling is that any firm inclined to reject me as a candidate out of hand because I have a blog is not the kind of firm that would be a fit for me. Unfortunately that may be all of them.

I'm still wandering around other law student blogs. It's interesting, when I poke around the archives of the better ones, the recurrent topics and themes common to so many. For example, pretty much every 1L writes about the same thing in the same month (eg, moot court, interviews, etc.) Same thing with the 2Ls, etc. It's like if I pick the November month of their first year, I will find posts strikingly similar to my own of that same time. Even if we weren't 1Ls in the same calendar year. There's variation, sure, for school differences, personality differences, political differences... but we're all wrestling with roughly the same things. Not just in terms of pedagogy but also the meta issues that give this experience context.

It is interesting to note, although it's only an impression gleaned from cursory poking-around, that there are more posts that are more curious about the law in people's first years. There's a certain sense of wonder in the experience, of finally getting to look under the veil and see what's going on, and then getting really excited to see how these legal principles apply to other things. By the second year we seem to be over it, although maybe it's just that we have no time for such decadence. We have to play up our own confident bravado, that we're law students and we know lots of stuff. More stuff than most people, and enough stuff that you should hire us.

It's kind of a shame, though, because I think a lot of the innate curiosity has been drummed out of us. I think some of the bloggers, maybe by virtue of the blogging exercise, still cling to some of it, still being somewhat inclined to peel back the layers of issues so we can have something to write about. But it's difficult. It's not encouraged. What is encouraged is to churn our massive amounts of work (at least in our second years) and not so much indulge in the luxury of just learning for its own sake.

Posted 11/25.

Journalists' privilege has been quite the topic lately. That is, does a journalist have the ability to promise anonymity to a source and be able to maintain that promise, even in the face of compulsion to testify.

It's a right near and dear to me. In high school as the editor-in-chief of the school paper, we promised anonymity to a letter writer confessing to some politically-motivated criminal mischief. The school administration, obviously miffed at what had happened under their noses, hauled me into the principal's office and demanded I turn over the letter and identify its source. They then gave my name to the police so that they could call me up and demand the same thing. I refused and retained the help of the Student Press Law Center and the ACLU. They backed down.

The shield law (how this privilege is known) is an important tenet to a free press and the good it provides in buttressing democracy. If journalists were forced to limit their inquiries to that which could safely be provided by sources without risk to their own well-being, journalists would have access to much more limited information. To find out what's really going on, journalists need to be able to get information from people closer to the source without putting them in jeopardy. If journalists can't promise that protection of anonymity, fewer people with information we all need to know about will be willing to share it.

There is more that can be said on this issue, but in the meantime another nuance has come up, which is to what extent bloggers would be protected by any right or privilege that is associated with the press. Recently Eugene Volokh wrote an op-ed in the New York Times arguing that bloggers should be able to claim that privilege, to the extent that privilege can be claimed by anyone. While his ultimate thoughts on the applicability of the shield law may not completely align with mine his association of bloggers with journalists as we currently think about them is what I want to point out here:

The First Amendment can't give special rights to the established news media and not to upstart outlets like ours. Freedom of the press should apply to people equally, regardless of who they are, why they write or how popular they are.

Yesterday I posted a similar thought on another blog in a discussion about indemnifying bloggers for libel suits and such. While the poster agreed that there should be some sort of financial protection for bloggers, he made a recommendation that it be provided by the blogging services. (There are blog-specific ISPs like Blogspot, TypePad, Blogger, Salon, etc. that allow people to set up their own blog on their infrastructure. It is also possible to set up blogging software, like Moveable Type, on a computer you control.) I wrote:

There is a subtext to the proposal that the blog hosts provide some sort of coverage, and it's similar to a subtext I see in some of the other articles considering where bloggers would stand in terms of shield law privileges, etc. - things we associate with "The Media." And that is, that you have no legitimate claim to being the Press unless someone else owns your press.

I opted to self-host for that very reason - I did not want any other entity to be able to claim any sort of ownership control over my work. It's my press, my voice. So if we, even inadvertently, start forcing bloggers into the corporate bosom* for "protection" we may very well eliminate the benefit of independent media that the blogging revolution has brought. We need to make sure that these independent voices can stand protected on their own.

The policy merits of having a free press extend to these independent mini-presses. In fact, they may be more valuable to our democracy than the over-consolidated mainstream press.

* I made a few minor changes in posting it here, using the word I'd been futilely searching for yesterday, and spelling other words I used correctly...

Update: This post on BoingBoing about the MSN blog hosting services implicates some of the concerns I raised.

I stumbled upon a blog set up by a doctoral candidate in mass communications researching why people start up blogs. Below is what I posted on his site:

I started blogging to complement the legal education I was about to pursue. One of the reasons I was motivated to go to law school was because the Important People were making all sorts of horrid decisions without asking me what I thought. Then I realized, I wasn't SAYING anything. I started the blog in large part because I wanted to start speaking up in the world, and this was an outlet, as someone [had] pointed out upthread, that didn't require annointment from the op-ed page editors of the world in order to be able to do it.

I also wanted to use it as a tool to measure the changes in my thinking the legal education was likely to affect. Although I blog about random things as the mood strikes, the core theme to it is the "Great Change" and how I've been changing, as a thinker and as a person, as a result of my education. To that end I talk about milestones in the process, contemplate legal doctrines and policies, and generally express thoughts about the world as I see it through my law student eyes. Through this exercise I hope that when I'm finished with school I will have left enough breadcrumbs that I can go back and review my growth.

Of course, these are but two of the reasons why I blog. But they are two of the biggest.

Read Part I

In his post he also raised the question of why I didn't have a blogroll on my website. The correct answer when he originally posted the question was that I didn't know what a blogroll was then. I'm still a little fuzzy on them (I haven't even mastered Trackback and how to kill the comment spam), but I think the answer now has more to do with not being sure I like the idea of having lots of external links plastered on my site. Maybe it's a sensitivity I developed when I was a corporate webmaster, when it was my job to figure out how to best use the limited page real estate for the exclusive and most effective messaging goals of the company. As it is, my left margin is pretty crowded, since as my blog grows and there are more and more archive links to include. I am, of course, flattered to be included on anyone else's blogroll, including the one from Notes from the Legal Underground, but I don't feel comfortable at the moment returning the favor. At least not in a blogroll.

On the other hand, the blogrolling question raises the larger issue of visibility. Preserving independent voices through blogging is very nice, but it's only meaningful if the voices can be heard. Otherwise it's just a lot of potentially brilliant shouting into the wind. I don't believe I'm nearly as widely read as I'd like to be, and I'm not entirely sure what to do about it. Mutual blogrolling seems like one way to address this problem of isolation, but personally I'd prefer a system a little more ad hoc and interactive. For instance, I'm perfectly comfortable linking to other people's sites inline with my own posts when I think there's something worthy to reference somehow. Also, if people take the time to interact with my writing, through comments or trackback, I'm more than happy to host links back to their sites as part of it. I would hope they'd do the same for me.

The problem with this method though is that it's so easy to abuse. Comment spammers have discovered how easy it is to co-opt someone else's web soapbox for their own selfish purposes (which is why I'm having to spend hours and hours deleting their self-referential crap). In theory I too could make lots of drive-by posts on lots of sites and get myself linked that way, and others could do the same to me. But I don't see this as a huge problem, not from an author-to-author perspective (as opposed to spammers who, in anonymous volume, simply use the visibility of other people's sites to game the Google link-ranking system and otherwise have no original expression to contribute to any sort of dialog). For one, Google, in concert with the major blog software developers and other search engines, has been working to address the spam problem by removing the incentive to do it. Updates to most blog software will automatically append a "nofollow" tag to any links posted by outsiders, meaning that the search engine spiders will not include the link in its rankings calculation. Which means that the only thing that could possibly be gained by including your own link on someone else's site is the hope that someone might follow it back to your own. And that won't happen unless it's clear that there's some sort of value in doing so. The merit of your message will earn you your visitors, which seems to be as it should.

I'm having a lot of problems with using the trackback feature to connect to others' sites, and it's meaning that I'm accidentally spamming them(!)

Moveable Type is smart enough to parse through my post and see if there are any URLs it can ping. It then does so. All well and good.

The problem is that I sometimes get an error message that the ping has not gone through. Which means that it tries again the next time I edit the post. This feature might be nice, if it weren't for the fact that the ping actually HAD gone through. MT is smart enough to know that if a ping went through it won't retry it on subsequent post rebuilds (what happens after you make an edit) but it does not readily seem possible to keep it from repinging the sites that were already successfully pinged, just without my MT installation knowing that.

This bug can pretty much kill any benefit to the feature.

It's becoming clear, regardless, that I'm going to need to upgrade my MT installation one way or another, and soon. But when.....???

Edit 1/26: On the other hand, the major polluting problem I'm having pertains to this post and my link to the other blog discussing the textbooks. The thing is, the breakdown really isn't on my end: his site keeps sending mine 500 error messages, when in truth it's been happily accepting all of the pings. So it isn't entirely the fault of my MT installation that it thinks the ping hasn't worked. However, I think it would be good if there were a way for me to override the renewed ping, so that every time I make an edit to the post I don't accidentally submit another trackback. Since *I* know that the ping went through, I should be able to easily inform MT of the fact and keep it from trying again. I'm presuming more recent versions of MT include this functionality, although I don't know for sure.

Ambivalent Imbroglio cited an argument raised by Professor Althouse, where she questioned the blogging predilections of left- and right-leaning bloggers. She questioned why left-leaners seem to link to others with the motivation to criticize whereas right-leaners are more likely to link to others with whom they agree (in her argument, "others" seems to be those who lean in the opposite direction.)

Below is the comment I posted on AI's site:

"To the extent that her observation is true, about left-leaners linking to things they disagree with and right-learners linking to things they agree with, let's think about why that might be.

If I (a presumptively left-leaning, though not particularly political, blogger) link to something I disagree with, it's generally because I think an important issue has been raised but that there's something missing from the analysis. I would post about it in order to add the insight I think is missing, which I think other people should consider. If I don't then also link to 'right-leaning' bloggers when I agree with them it's not that I begrudge the consensus, but simply that I don't think there's necessarily a point in doing it. There's nothing that can be added to the discourse by simply saying 'Right on!' when consensus happens to occur. (For what it's worth, however, sometimes I still might be inclined to link to something with which I agree if the analysis parallels mine to the point where I would simply want to point out how someone else has grasped the issue in a way I think it important. In other words, linking to their articulation spares me the trouble of having to write mine...)

I suspect that the reason a right-leaner might see the value in linking when there's consensus is because it suits the objective of creating hegemony around the ideas they prefer. A left-leaner might have the motivation to say, look, there's something missing from the discussion that we really need to consider. A right-leaner's motivation might, on the other hand, very well be to demonstrate, 'See, we all think this so it must be right,' which strengthens the force of those ideas in society, and ultimately serves to further marginalize dissent."

Edit 2/20: Ambivalent Imbroglio posted a response on his blog.

Back when I still was rife with enthusiasm and energy (when was that?) I mentioned to the BU administration that it should provide a blogging infrastructure for students and faculty. Great, they said. Make a proposal.

Unfortunately, I'm completely embroiled in classes, job hunting, running the IP Law Society, the communications committee, Note writing and other journal activities, convalescing, etc etc etc so my proposal writing has been delayed. But I did drop a note to another former BU student who blogs, Andrew Sinclair for his thoughts on the matter. He posted them here.

Ambivalent Imbroglio posted a question about "the ethics and boundaries of blawgging a summer job."

On the Legal Ethics Forum site Brad Wendel posted a broad admonition not to do it at all. I took issue with his response, and posted the following in the comments:

"If the word 'blogging' were not mentioned, if the question had been simply 'what is ok to talk about from the summer associate experience,' what would your advice have been then? Gossiping about co-workers? That seems ill-advised in any context. Discussing clients' cases? Rule 1.6 frowns upon that even among as small an audience as friends and family.

I suspect you wouldn't suggest that summer associates completely sequester themselves and never speak a word about the experience to anyone, ever. Surely when they leave for work every day they do not disappear into a black hole, from which no information - not even the color of the office walls - is permitted to emerge.

In fact, such secrecy would be bad for the profession. Strong policy arguments can be made for making lawyering seem a lot like less of a black box, for the benefit of both future and current practitioners as well as the public. How the practice of law really works, and the general policy issues that the practice will inevitably raise, should be able to see the light of day. Blogging simply is more efficient way of communicating these points than having numerous individual conversations, which in many situations would otherwise likely be considered completely acceptable. (I presume, but please correct me if I'm wrong.)

So it would be more helpful if instead of issuing a broad interdiction on blogging, you could instead provide guidelines for helping summer associates evaluate which of the types of information they might be inclined to disclose would either further the cause of transparency, or instead run afoul of the ethics rules (or worse, the dreaded label of 'bad judgement.') All summer associates - all LAWYERS - need to know this, whether they are bloggers or not."

I think what set me off is that it overgeneralized bloggers. There are likely some who have no cognizance of the impact of their blogging, but it strikes me that anyone thoughful enough to ask the question is not one of them. There are also good, important things that blogging can impart, so the expectation that the entire summer job experience should be so verboten to blog about - yet not so verboten to speak about generally - seems overreaching, and itself unfortunate in its consequences.

Edit: See the post at Legal Ethics Forum for responses to my comment.

I've not been too keen about the term "blawg," but it does seem to have reached wide circulation with an agreed-upon meaning: a blog that deals with the law. To the extent that such a thing requires a separate nomenclature, this is a good term for it, implicitly combining in itself the combination of memes it embodies: "law" and "blog."

But what of other languages? Are they not to also have a certain special term to describe their legal blogs? Certainly if English blogs have need for it, ones in other languages would as well.

Enter Cedric Manara to solve the problem, at least as far as French speakers are concerned. He recommends "jurnal," and I heartily endorse his suggestion. It combines, both in suffix and pronunciation, the word "journal" (meaning newspaper) and the root "jur-," as in "juridique" (or the English word "jurist").

Surely the Academie Francaise would approve.

I may personally adopt it to describe my own blog, mostly because I think "blawg" looks so phoenetically ugly. It seems to encapsulate in its spelling a rather disdainful pronunciation of the word "blog," like someone was saying it very mockingly. "Jurnal," by contrast, looks more distinguished. Of course, everything sounds more distinguished when said in French...

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.

The group blog De Novo lost some of its contributors to graduation. It invited other people to audition as replacements, so I thought I'd give it a shot.

I have some mixed feelings about blogging somewhere other than here, so I'll have to see how it goes. On the one hand I'm excited about having my writing be more visible (of course, on the other hand, the prospect is also a bit terrifying...). Often I'd really like to stimulate discussion, and I just don't get the traffic here to birth the kind of robust debates in the comments that De Novo can attract. The hope is that by contributing to this other blog I'll ultimately be able to increase my readership here.

But my main concern is that I don't want my contribution there to come at the expense of my writing here. I have a tremendous amount of pride in my own blog, and a sense of commitment to my project and my audience. I don't want to do anything that would cause me to compromise it. I have the worry that posts that I put over there should really have enhanced my site over here. It also concerns me that since I don't "own" the other blog, I don't have control over my writing. De Novo could disappear one day, and my writing would be gone with it. So maybe what I'll do is cross-post, or at least excerpt, what I post over there, here. I hope everyone will be ok with that plan, because I think it will make me feel much better.

For only the second time ever (I think... maybe it's the third?) I made the the Weekly Law School Roundup. Dave! observed that last week I was busy grading the writing competition. I suspect he picked that out of my week's accomplishments out of a certain amount of self-interest, because otherwise I'm surprised he didn't comment on my Huey Lewis and the News concert-going, which was much more interesting. (Hell, even my dental visit was more exciting...)

Of course, every week seems to include one of those (HLN concerts, not dentist appointments, thank goodness), so I guess it isn't really news...

(Either that, or maybe he didn't want to enable more bad puns.)

Through two posts on the Conglomerate (behold the irony...) I found a post by Professor Ribstein asserting that, like they do for their academic papers, academic bloggers should have the same obligation to do due dilligence in finding previous posts others have written on the same topic, with the same position.

At the Conglomerate, Will Baude and Christine Hurt both demurred. As did I in the comments of Ribstein's post:

"I think I'm more likely to agree with Will Baude and Christine Hurt, in part because I'm not sure what the concern is behind your assertion, 'In the academic setting, this ignorance of the prior literature would be a bad thing, a sign of academic negligence.'

It would seem that if you are trying to write a major academic research document on Topic, and you don't include a reference to another major document on Topic, it undermines your credibility as someone who can speak authoritatively about Topic. Still I don't see that as being an ethical problem in terms of morality, but perhaps it may be an ethical one in terms of the actual ethos of the author itself.

But a blog post is often a vastly different creature than a major academic publication. They are created much more speedily, and are often a reflection of first impression. That first impression can often provide a great deal of insight on an issue, which would be lost if each time a poster had an idea they had to find all possible similar expressions. Not only would the exercise be burdensome and impractical, but it would also wreck that instinctive native reaction, so that by the time the thought did get expressed (if the author has not given up by now) it would have inherently changed as a result of exposure to others' thoughts. I think that's a much greater harm than having multiple people unknowingly post similarly. Great minds do think alike, after all, and I don't think we should be afraid of that happening in the blogosphere. In fact, it would tend to suggest the correctness of the expressed thought that so many people were able to think it."

I think, reading between the lines, Ribstein may be concerned that credit is not being given where it's due - to the first thinker of a thought. But as I've discussed before, I don't think failure to do so is necessarily an ethical issue - nor should it be.

Seeing as how I'm the colloquium director, I thought I should announce this here:

Boston University Journal of Science and Technology Law announces a Colloquium, to be held February 11, 2006, to consider the legal complexities facing the growing blogging community. Our goal is to collect a body of scholarship on the legal issues bloggers face in order to provide courts with some guidance as cases are litigated in these areas. We therefore welcome submissions from a broad and diverse range of voices and research areas: practitioners, judges, activists, and academics.

Some questions to consider:
• Are bloggers journalists? If so, what liabilities and privileges do they have?
• How do intellectual property laws affect what bloggers can or cannot post?
• What are the ethical issues bloggers need to consider?
• Can bloggers be fired for blogging?
• How does the First Amendment apply to blogging?
• How do jurisdictional boundaries, international and domestic, affect the legal issues potentially raised by blogging?
• How do any of these issues change with the introduction of syndication, inline advertisements or tip jars, podcasting, or multiple authors on a single blog?

Paper proposals should include an abstract of no more than 1200 words, as well as the author’s curriculum vitae. Please send proposals via e-mail in Word document format to jstl@bu.edu by September 1, 2005. Your subject line should read: Colloquium Paper Proposal: [Title]. The Journal will announce its decisions by October 1, 2005. Papers from the Colloquium will be published in Volume 12 of the Boston University Journal of Science and Technology Law.

Questions or comments can also be directed to me.

(And thanks to Professor Barnett for blogging it at the Volokh Conspiracy.)

I hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate it when my blog goes down.

It makes me feel like I've lost a limb.

Which might sound a little dramatic, but I really do enjoy writing. I miss it palpably when I don't get to do it, especially when there are thoughts zooming around in my head that I really must get out. They bounce around increasingly frenetically, like heated molecules, until I can at last articulate them and release the building pressure. And so I must write, so that there will be room for other thoughts to occur.

Certainly I can write offline, and indeed I do. But there's something like a rush of endorphins I experience when I see my words show up on my blog. I look at them and marvel, "I created that." It's a nice feeling and one I miss when I can't have it.

An article today lists eight reasons why blogging can advance your career:

1. Blogging creates a network.

A blogger puts himself out in the world as someone who is interesting and engaging -- just the type of person everyone wants to meet.

…

2. Blogging can get you a job.

Dervala Hanley writes a quirky literary blog that got her a job is at Stone Yamashita Partners, a consulting firm that ''tries to bring humanity to business." Hanley says the firm was attracted to her ability to put her business experience into personal terms on the blog.

3. Blogging is great training.

To really get attention for your blog, you're going to have to have daily entries for a while. At least a few months to get rolling, and then three or four times a week after that. So you will really get to know your topic well.

I would add that it's also great training for any job that requires you to be able to express yourself clearly. (Which I think would be all of them...)

4. Blogging helps you move up quickly.

To escape the entry-level grind, you can either pay your dues, working up a ladder forever, or you can establish yourself as an expert in the world by launching a blog. High-level jobs are for people who specialize, and hiring managers look for specialists online. ''Decision-makers respect Google-karma," writes Tim Bray, director of Web technologies for Sun Microsystems -- on his own blog, of course.

5. Blogging makes self-employment easier.

You can't make it on your own unless you're good at selling yourself. One of the most cost-effective and efficient ways of marketing yourself is with a blog. When someone searches for your product or service, make sure your blog comes up first.

…

6. Blogging provides more opportunities.

…

A blog gives you a leg up when you meet someone new. Dylan Tweney, a freelance writer, says a blog gives him instant legitimacy with clients.

7. Blogging could be your big break.

… Mark Fearing has a cartoon blog. ''Cartooning and illustration are very crowded fields," he says.

''My blog has gotten me more notice than any other publicity tool I've used. Plus, the blog gives me a way to have a new conversation with potential clients about other work."

8. Blogging makes the world a better place.

''Blogging is about giving stuff away to a community," says Day. ''For years, as a junior developer, I would go to the Internet for solutions and I would always take, take, take. Now I am happy to be a contributor and give something back."

My gut feeling is (and always has been) that these reasons are real. And I think there may be a ninth reason, which is that I think it can show a certain cutting-edge savvy, especially for a blog that predates the buzz.

I can't see my stats so I have no idea how many people regularly read my blog (although I know there are a few based on repeat commenters and occasions where I've found myself listed on others' blogrolls). But what's really interesting to me is the emails I've gotten from one-off readers, or readers who have googled a subject I've written about and apparently found me to be one of the leading authorities on it. I find this incredibly cool (and flattering). But I don't think I would be able to capture their esteem if, when they followed the link over and poked around the rest of the site, they didn't also like what they saw. The above reasons may hold only if you have a good blog. With a bad blog, I'm sure all bets are off.

All the cool people are doing it... live blogging from the colloquium on legal bloggership. (Apologies to Prof. Froomkin, who apparently hates this word.)

I can't deal with live blogging right now - I'd rather digest and then post thoughts afterwards. Plus it chagrins me that I haven't had the chance to review the papers... But if you'd like you can tune in, or review the other live bloggers, or the people live blogging the live bloggers...

I've made an editorial decision to overrule the 18th Edition of the Bluebook on citing blogs, because I've decided it's just wrong. Blog posts should be cited like regular articles are cited. Therefore it should be this:

Susan Crawford, Onward, SUSAN CRAWFORD BLOG, Apr. 27, 2006, http://scrawford.blogware.com/blog/_archives/2006/4/27/1917067.html.

and not:

Susan Crawford Blog, http://scrawford.blogware.com/blog/ (Apr. 27 2006 22:05 EDT).

Among the flaws of the proscribed format, they seem to be a little too trusting in the accuracy of the date stamps...

The important thing about a cite is that it indicate who said what and when, none of which is captured by the Bluebook form. (In fact, the only reason Susan Crawford name shows up at all is that she used it for her blog title. Poor Howard Bashman, though, who foolishly chose a non-eponymous blog name...)

For only the third (I think) time ever, I've made the Law School Round-up! (It was my fabulous llama post that did it this time.) As is traditional, I make this post to acknowledge my resulting meteoric rise from obscurity to semi-obscurity. Er, well maybe not semi obscurity as much as seven-eighths obscurity, but I'll take what I can get.

Apologies for this being very, very late….

As mentioned before, pretty much everyone who attended the conference blogged about it. (Larry Solum has one of the more detailed summaries. So does Ian Best.)

I'm glad I attended, even though I was pretty wiped out and giving up necessary paper-writing time. This obviously is a topic of great interest to me, and it was extremely constructive to hang out with some of the luminaries in this space. (I was also due a blogging colloquium, dammit!)

My overall impression was that there is some trepidation within the academy about the role of blogging, even by prolific bloggers. But I think this is due in part to the amorphous nature of what it means to be a law professor and the professional need for their own personal definitions to conform with those of their peers. Also there was Professor Barnett's comment, "If I were standing before an audience of non-bloggers I would be all 'rah-rah blogging.' But because I'm not I think it's important to point out some caveats." The biggest downside raised overall was the time-suck factor - was blogging taking away from something else they should have been doing.

But I found, particularly with the morning panels, that the discussion was rather insular, focusing almost exclusively on the role of blogging within the academy. Of course, nominally that's what both sessions were supposed to do. But I mean that the analysis focused so exclusively on the role of blogging within their professional sphere that it missed out on an accurate valuation their blogging has beyond the academy.

I'm speaking of that important aspect of translating legal knowledge for the consumption of the public. Many of the bloggers in attendance do a fantastic job at that. Just consider how many of the Volokh Conspiracy readers are non-lawyers or other legal professionals. While some attention was given to this aspect in passing (although Larry Ribstein did focus on it more directly), I think the conversation largely ignored the huge impact that legal blogging could have in advancing wider public discourse beyond the walls of the academy - and that such a result would be greatly desirable. The panelists by and large seemed to have a great awareness of how they are perceived within the academy, but generally a much more limited sense of how they were outside it. Although I was impressed by the panelists' humility (because while for me being there was like being in a room full of celebrities, it was probably just as well no one had really internalized that perception) I felt that many of them underestimated the value of their own voice. They were so concerned about the specific substance of their legal posts - and how the academy used it to keep score - that they may have overlooked their general ethos as a blogging persona, which gave them greater reach and influence than they realized.

Written shortly after the colloquium - on 5/2 - but posted 7/9.

One other topic that had been heavily bandied about during the blogging colloquium was the type of content appropriate for a law blog. Resolution was not reached, but interesting points were raised. On the one hand there's someone like Ann Althouse, who blogs on serious matters but also on quite a few other topics, ranging from artistic musings to personal glimpses to synopses of television shows. There was an undercurrent of fear in the comments of most of the other panelists that too much non-law material could be detrimental to one's ethos as a legal scholar, but no one could quite put their finger on where the line should be drawn between bloggable and non-bloggable material. And indeed there are few, if any, serious legal bloggers who draw the line at 100% serious material. Gordon Smith blogs cheese, Howard Bashman Phillies games... Even Eugene Volokh posts silly things from time to time.

Michael Froomkin addresses the problem of tone by maintaining separate blogs. To an extent I think this is a sensible approach, especially for blogs, like his ICANNwatch blog, that are dedicated to a specific topic. But what's sort of interesting is that I don't read that blog - I read his regular, more personal blog. When I met him I told him I liked reading it, but this seemed to perplex him. Why would I? Because I trusted his voice, I told him.

Trusting a blogger's voice is probably the key determinant in whether someone reads their blog or not. But "trust" can mean some combination of many things. For one, it can mean just liking the voice. And this, too, can mean several things. It can mean liking the writing style, and it can mean liking the person behind it. There are a couple of blogs I don't read anymore because even though they were expertly written, there was something about the underlying personality that didn't sit well with me. Similarly there are some blogs I don't read because their writing is too dense or technical. Or updated too frequently or infrequently. Reading a blog shouldn't feel like work. There are few bloggers who are worthwhile enough to read for me to feel inclined to tolerate the sense of burden. So "liking" the writing/the blog/the person means you trust that reading the blog will be a worthwhile and not un-pleasant investment of your time.

Then there's "trust" as in trusting the author's ethos. Do you believe what the author is telling you? Do you even care what they might have to say on the subject? Law professors by default seem to have good ethos on law topics, although I suppose it's a rebuttable presumption if they continually post in an unsophisticated way. Lawyers and law students, by contrast, tend to need to earn their ethos, but many do. A series of cogent, thoughtful, interesting posts certainly can snag me as a regular reader. I do tend to have problems with political blogs, however, for this reason. Even when they are blogs of my political persuasion I don't enjoy them when they are little more than self-serving pats on the back for being "right" about things. If they don't look deeper into the issues and policies, if they don't give credit to the opposition when it's due, if they aren't self-critical of the "home team" when it's appropriate, and if the sole purpose to their prose is to keep score in the "us v. them" political universe they've defined, I tend not to read them. I would much rather read a thoughtful blog by someone who doesn't usually vote my preferred ticket than an unthoughtful one by someone who does. If there's at least some evidence that the author thinks credibly then I'm much more willing to trust them when they share the results of that thinking. (This is true for any kind of blog.)

Ultimately "trust" is a complex thing. It's more than subject matter expertise; it's a deeper form of credibility. It boils down to a willingness to join a blogger on their journey, to let them blogger say whatever they want to say when he or she wants to say it and not demand from them "all erudition all the time," or all humor or all whatever. Trusting the voice means trusting the person behind it to feed you the words he wants to convey just because he wants to convey them. Even if sometimes it happens to be "cheese."

I'm starting to think about making some changes to my blog. The first change will be to move it to a new server. Presumably I'll do that soon, and hopefully there won't be much down time during the transition. But watch this space, because one never knows...

Beyond that, at some point it will be time to retire this blog and begin another. In a sense the change is just a formality; much of the new blog will be a lot like the old. So why the change? Well, for one, it will give me a chance to update the look and feel a bit. I like the basic simplicity of this one, but I might like to change the fonts and accent colors and such.

The bigger reason is because I think it's getting to be time to give the blog a new focus. At some point this story will have been told; I will have become a lawyer. To an extent, I want to claim that ethos. I mean, realistically, whom are you going to take more seriously - a law student, or a lawyer? I want to be able to state my ideas with more authority than I think I can under the current framework.

But the other reason is that the focus of a blog serves as a filter for posts. I include in this version, for instance, a lot more moments of personal analysis - particularly at low points - than I necessarily wish to as a blogging professional. But because the main focus of this blog is to tell the story of the transition from layperson to lawyer, those insights are appropriate and necessary to telling that story honestly. So I need to find a new story to tell, a new focus, in order to be able to find a new filter.

For those of you who know and love to read about my general, non-lawyerly exploits, however, don't worry - I'm still going to be me. And I'm still going to enjoy doing and writing about these things. Maybe it will compromise my ethos somewhat and skew my cheese ratio, but I think that's a risk I'm willing to take. If I expect people to read my serious ideas I need to be engaging enough to keep them reading during the intervals (and there will be intervals since I can't manage a lifestyle so singularly focused on the serious). I need readers to care enough about what I have to say in order to care enough about what I have to say...

The long-debated issue of whether or not my blog should be on my resume has been resolved in favor of including it. Maybe it wasn't so much the case a few years ago, but at this point in history more people have heard of blogs, and more people are aware of the existence and credibility of legal blogs. So I chose to advertise my own, because I am proud of it and because I think it demonstrates integrity to stand by the things I write. If I left it off the resume I'd have to presume employers would still find it by googling, at which point they could easily feel I was being deceptive by not having mentioned it. I wish to make it readily clear that I take my blogging very seriously and that I'm not at all afraid for them to discover it. I welcome readers of all stripes…

More troubling is whether I can continue to blog and become a member of the New York Bar. This is of significant enough concern that I've thought about not getting sworn in (should I pass the exam) until this issue is resolved (lest I become immediately disbarred…). The issue: that New York wants to treat lawyer blogs like lawyer advertisements and subject them to the same regulations. Some people think this is no big deal. Just throw up a disclaimer (the wisdom of itself being subject to debate) and leave it at that.

Ignoring for a moment the strong policy and free speech problems with a rule like that proposed in New York, the other problem is that it's not so simple to merely throw up a disclaimer and be done with it. New York has stringent archival and registration requirements for lawyer advertisements. Every ad must be filed with the state and retained for at least a year since its distribution. Imagine what that means for regular bloggers! Indeed, would the state even be able to cope with the avalanche of print-outs generated from the regularly-blogging lawyer? Assuming, of course, that the lawyer wasn't completely turned off from blogging as a result of the obligatory hassle.

The normative problems are the most troubling, however. One reason why I doggedly pursue a path of openly and proudly including my blogging as part of my legal career path is because it was part and parcel of what I hoped to achieve by entering this field in the first place. Going to law school was about more than the practice of law - it was about enhancing my civic participation. Both the pursuit of the practice and the blogging advance that goal. A noble goal, dare I say, and one we should encourage more people - including lawyers - to actively pursue. Indeed it would enhance the esteem of the profession if the public at large believed that lawyers were really looking out for the greater good.

So when they attempt to, through projects like blogging, they should be encouraged, not inhibited. The more rarified the profession, the less credibility it has to the wider citizenry. Which seems to be the very thing the ethics rules are designed to minimize - the ability for lawyers to wield power over the public through the myth of their authority. Legal blogging has the power to even the playing field, by making the practice and institution of law accessible and understandable to people without the particular training. That result is highly desirable and should not be squelched through the misplaced zeal to regulate.

My blog has been languishing lately, due to a combination of several forces. One is logistical: I've been working a lot, but without a set schedule, so it's been hard to establish a routine that will give me enough of the calm and reflective time I need to construct decent posts.

Some of it is ethical, for lack of a better way to describe it. As I mentioned before, now that I'm finally working in a law office I'm zooming up the learning curve and nearly daily gaining new insights into what it means to practice law. These are absolutely important lessons that belong in a story of the Great Change, but I hesitate in posting about them because I don't want to inadvertently divulge client confidences (very, very bad) or even inadvertently compromise the general interest of the firm (also bad, though not disbar-able necessarily). So at minimum I try to take some time to think over what I'm inclined to share, which is prudent, but what's been happening is that too much time ends up passing and I lose the original spark that would have allowed me to make an interesting post.

Another consideration is self-interested pragmatism. Part of the Great Change story is figuring out how *I* fit inside this profession. But these posts tend to be the more navel-gazing and moody posts. Potentially well-written and moody posts, absolutely legitimate (indeed, perhaps integral) posts as part of the Great Change story, but: I'm looking for a job. Even if I didn't have my blog on my resume I'd still have to operate under the assumption that an employer could find it. Which raises the direct concern of the impact that negativity can have on my chances. If you wouldn't express negativity in an interview, are you as a candidate well served if that negativity you held back is otherwise so exposed and available to the interviewer? Probably not. However, I do think there's something to be said for honesty as an author, which I think translates to honesty as a person. I don't think all negativity or candor is necessarily adverse to my interests, including these vocational ones. I don't think I have to falsely portray myself as some sort of Pollyanna for whom nothing is ever bad and who only ever has happy thoughts to share. Because that would be a lie, and everyone would know it. So I think there is a path to be hewn here, where honesty and candor can be expressed in a non-detrimental way, but it's a narrow path that must be traveled carefully. Hence the pulled punches and slower posting as I try to take that care.

And there's another consideration, which I'm not entirely sure how to describe, but for now I'll call "political." This has to do with a general sense that now that I'm out of law school, it's "game on." When you're a student, I think a lot can be forgiven. You're learning, everyone knows that, and while you may stumble onto some brilliant insights I think people are willing to grant mulligans if you at times veer down some wayward paths. But as a full-fledged capable, educated adult - now what you do is supposed to matter. You need to get it right.

To an extent these "political" considerations are connected to the job hunt. If I make assertions of personal belief that seem inconsistent with too many clients' interests, a firm may not want to hire me. But my larger concern is based on a longer view, because more than a job what I really want is influence in the world. If I'm going to make it better, then I need to have a voice that will be listened to. And that's where my hesitation lies now, because I see myself crafting with my writing my (for lack of a better term) political persona. And that's a tricky thing to do. I think my actual political persona is a good one: idealistic but open-minded, tenacious but thoughtful, etc. Like I'm sure many people's are, it's an effective mélange of seemingly paradoxical qualities that aren't actually so paradoxical when put into play. But a specific writing inherently captures only a single glimpse of this personality, so over the span of many writings it may seem like there's a lot of inconsistency or hypocrisy based upon these potentially conflicting and incomplete glimpses. Over many, many writings a more complete and accurate picture of the author might be gleaned, certainly, but as an author you can't count on a reader to take that much trouble to be such a student of your work. Each writing really needs to be able to stand on its own as a reasonably accurate (if not oversimplified) representation of the writer. This is especially important because it's so easy to have certain writings be so prominent in the attention they receive that you end up being forever labeled by them. Or, even worse, because it's so easy to have certain writings be misinterpreted, meaning that not only do you become labeled by them, but you get labeled incorrectly.

This prospect to me is very scary, as there's a limit to how brilliantly I could possibly write to forestall such mislabeling from happening. Even the most brilliant writers have readers who miss the point, even of their most meticulously-written and edited tomes. And I'm not writing novels; I'm a developing writer writing quickly-written blog posts. The odds that something may go wrong in trying to transmit my thoughts from my head to my readers' is really quite high. And that may be the biggest reason why I've been posting so scantly lately.

So what to do? Well, initially there is the "muddle forth" approach that has served me in good stead before. At some point my schedule will stabilize, but in the meantime I'll do the best I can with it. While this may sound odd, given the other important priorities in my life, I do need to make more of an effort to write. When I don't write, I start to fear writing as it always starts to appear more and more as some looming laborious chore I can't even begin to surmount. When I do write, though, I remember that I like writing and it helps stoke my confidence in all the writing I need to do (cover letters, anyone?). Watching my words slide off my brain and onto the page makes me feel like a potent master of language, something I'll need to be if I'm going to get done all the things in life I want to get done.

Still, I'm not sure how quickly I'll be able to churn out the meaty posts given the other concerns mentioned above. Thus there may be more "cheese" around here as I just play around with language and try to keep readers reasonably entertained. I hate having long gaps between posts. Not only do I feel worried that the people who came to read yet found nothing new won't ever come back, but I also feel guilty, like I've let people down. I really like the idea that people enjoy my writing; it pleases me in a way I didn't know I could be pleased until I started doing it. So I hate, hate, hate not offering people that pleasure when they come by to read me, and hope that I can at least offer readers small tidbits in the meantime so that they don't feel like they were wasting their time by visiting.

And eventually - probably sometime within the next few months - I will break from this blog and go to the next. I am committed to telling the Great Change story, and there is clearly more to tell of it, but I'm also beginning to regard it as something of a shackle that I'd like to break free of. This whole "becoming a lawyer" thing is a skin that's becoming a little too tight. I'm due for a molting... and can't wait to try out my brand new grown-up lawyer body. As well as write in a way that reflects that new stature. So I will find an appropriate moment to make that change in both personal and blog identity, although it won't be quite yet.

See, I was right: law blogging does have legitimacy, and it's increasingly being recognized.

Santa Clara law prof Eric Goldman will be hosting a roundtable for Bay Area legal bloggers at the end of the month. I'm one of the participants, so if you've ever wanted to see what I look like in person, now's your chance...

Here's the details (as copied from his blog March 2, go to the source for updates):

The High Tech Law Institute at SCU Law is sponsoring a gathering for Bay Area legal bloggers/blawgers. Our goal is to get all of us together in a room to meet each other, socialize a bit, and discuss topics of common interest in a group discussion. Light refreshments will be served. The details:

Who: The event will cater principally to legal bloggers in the Bay Area, but everyone is welcome. Confirmed blogger-attendees so far include Matt Cutts of Google (75% confirmed), Mike Dillon of Sun, Cathy Gellis, Eric Goldman of SCU, Joe Gratz of Keker & Van Nest, Chris Hoofnagle of Boalt, Cathy Kirkman of Wilson Sonsini, David Levine of Stanford Law CIS, Kristie Prinz, Colin Rule of eBay/PayPal, Colin Samuels, Jason Schultz of EFF and Colette Vogele.

When: March 28, 6-8 pm
Where: Wiegand Room, Arts & Sciences Building, Santa Clara University. Directions to campus.
Cost: Free. Parking is available for $5.
CLE: This event qualifies for 1 hour of general CLE credit. Santa Clara University School of Law is a State Bar of California approved MCLE provider.
How: Please RSVP to Eric Goldman.

Feel free to pass along this notice to anyone you think might be interested.

Last week I drove down to Santa Clara for the aforementioned blawging roundtable. (I hate the word "blawg," although sometimes it's more bother than it's worth to resist it.) I didn't know quite what to expect from the evening - I'm not sure anyone did - but it turned out to be quite interesting. There were about 40-50 people in the room, mostly bloggers, although a few were just blog readers. Most were also legal bloggers in some respect, although some were technology or political bloggers. Then again, even law blogs come in all shapes and sizes, so who can really say that one topic is necessarily mutually exclusive of the other.

And even those who were more identifiable as legal bloggers came in all shapes and sizes as well. In-house counsel, firm associates, public interest lawyers, law students, law professors... with each putting their blog to different use. For instance, for some their blogs were dedicated to focusing on a particular area of law, while for others, the blog was a chance to create some transparency for this legal world we occupy.

The evening began with everyone sitting around a large table and sharing their war stories. There were a few discussion leaders who tossed out some pre-planned discussion topics, but what was most illuminating about the exercise was how much about the blogging experience was shared. Beyond the certain concerns we all found ourselves facing as bloggers - like the possible effect on one's professional esteem or potential legal liabilities - there were also certain recurrent experiences that can only come from sitting in the captain's chair at the helm of a blog.

There is, as often has been discussed, a risk to putting yourself so out there, and attendees talked about some of the (I'm not sure "negative" is the right word, so let's go with) stranger experiences they've had. But there are also fantastic rewards, and we talked about those too. The thing about blogging is that it's kind of scary. It's a very new thing, and no one really knows how it will all play out. It also tends to be a very solitary thing. Although some people are on group blogs, even so, for the most part blogging is about you putting forward something of you extremely conspicuously. Blog posts are rarely written by consensus, so it's usually just your own neck that's been extended, and it can make you feel very vulnerable. So it was nice to discover that none of us were really quite so alone out there, that all the weird and wonderful things that happen to us as bloggers were happening to all the rest of us too.

You may notice that the preceding post has a much earlier date stamp than it actually appeared on the blog. This is because after writing it, I decided to think about it for a while before posting. And then I didn't, because I've been busy...

I recognize though that I've also been unusually self-conscious about my posts lately. This is largely because, between Blawg Roundtables, job hunting, and the like, I'm acutely aware that people are actually looking at my blog. This is a good thing, but I find myself preoccupied with the particular snapshot of posts that will appear on the front page. A series of silly, cheesy posts might be fine in the course of the lifespan on the blog, but if I have, say, three of them sitting right at the top when Big Important Hiring Partner comes by to read the blog, he might get the impression that I am a silly, cheesy person. Of course, query whether that impression would actually be wrong...

More consequentially, however, I find myself holding back more on the serious posts. I feel like it's much more important to get them right and not be sloppy with logic or language. Which is not to say that I've done a bad job with it in the past. There are some posts I would like to undo, but really only a handful in what is more than 1000(!) posts. So it's not really self-consciousness that's holding me back, per se, but more an issue of time. I'm not getting the right kinds of periods of time where I can still the swirl of the rest of life and make sure I can form these posts right. I can usually tell, when I'm writing, when they're not quite on the mark, but I'm not always able, in the time window available, to navigate my way to the perfect solution of how they need to be.

The result is a lot of interesting ideas that end up evaporating because I'm not able to properly capture them at the moment of inspiration, which makes me sad. Also, the posting that I do manage to do is coming out uneven, with days of silence followed by another day of a dozen posts. This kind of situation has happened before - in fact, I think I've probably written similar posts to this one on several occasions before - so long-time readers may be accustomed to the ebb and flow of my posting, but I wanted to specifically address it for people who are new here and perhaps worried that I'm not taking my blogging seriously. I know that when I check out a new site that doesn't have a lot of activity I often leave it and don't come back, so I just wanted to say something lest any new readers be inclined to do the same thing here.

Wow, when I fall off the blogging wagon I fall hard... If I'm writing every day it's easy to keep writing, but it's hard to start-up again after I've stopped for a while. It's like the muscle gets stiff.

It also gets the story out of order. One thought leads to another, but because I hadn't posted about the first thought the second thought doesn't make sense. Once I get behind, it snowballs and gets more and more difficult if not impossible to catch up.

Anyway. The story so far is that I got back from New Jersey and am now back at my job. I'm having to spend a lot of time doing the *$&# homework for the CLE classes, but otherwise I'm looking forward and trying to plan what comes next.

I think I need to put myself on a regimen. Like a blog post a day, or something like that. Because I'm finding it really hard lately to scrounge these posts together.

For one thing, I'm working a lot, partly because the work requires it and partly because my bank account does. The bar exam and CLEs were devastating financially, both in terms of their own costs and in their prevention of me from fully working. So I'm putting in long hours to catch up. Unfortunately by the time I get home I just feel like turning off my brain, not revving it up to blog.

But I think it's because I've gotten out of the rhythm of regular blogging that it's been requiring so much effort. Blogging tends to beget more blogging, where I can queue up thoughts in my head and fairly effortlessly get them down on the page. But right now it's not so effortless, and I miss that.

Also complicating matters is that I feel like I'm being held back by some indecision about where I want to go, both in terms of my life generally and this blog specifically. With bar exams behind me (hopefully forever) and finally some working experience, I feel like I've reached a new plateau in the Great Change. Important changes are now happening to me as part of it - yet I find myself not wanting to talk about them. Part of that is because I think I'm growing a little bored with telling my story. What I want to do is seize my ethos and write more substantive essays. The navel-gazing is getting tedious, but since I committed to telling the story honestly a lot of it comes with the territory.

Then there's also the concern that with too much transparency I could show my hand in a way that would be disadvantageous. It does occur to me that as I plan the path of my life I should probably play my cards a little closer to my chest than my story-telling instincts are generally inclined to do. This sense is further heightened by the tinge of negativity my thoughts lately have been taking. This stage I've reached may in fact be the most profound moment of my Great Change, because I can finally feel my PollyAnna idealism being chipped away. I think maybe I will talk about that. In fact I think I should talk about that because I think it reflects the defects of this legal industry more than it reflects any defects in me. In other areas of my life I'm actually not all that negative, but there are clearly some systemic issues with the practice of law that are destructive and they should be exposed. But if I'm going to bitch and moan publicly, I'd like to do it with reason and composure, and I fear I'm still too justifiably frustrated, and busy, to easily muster either.

I do, however, really like entertaining through my blog. Forget the legal aspect, I really like crafting language into something enjoyable to read, no matter what the topic. So if I have to forgo the serious topics for a while maybe that's just what I'll do and not worry about it. I'll write about whatever pleases me because it does, and then later use that momentum to write about the important things too.

Posting's been scant lately because of increased busy-ness at work, three Huey Lewis and the News concerts this past week (which I do want to blog about in particular and hope to do so soon), and my continued enslavement to the New Jersey CLE requirements. I still have three more assignments to complete, and they all take hours to do. I want my life back!

Relatedly, the Great Change is still underway, and I'm curious where it will lead me. I would like to thrash out a few posts exploring some of the questions it's raising at some point, and then I'd also like to talk about some of the other things I've got going on...

Work will stay busy for the indefinite future, but the CLEs are all due within the next three weeks. In that time I've also got a wedding to attend (actually, I don't mean that to sound like a chore) and the Cal football season begins, so while I liked the idea of a post-a-day regimen, it might be a bit before I'll be able to adopt it.

But stay tuned, because to me, while it makes more sense to live life than just write about it, without also writing about it life is just not fully lived.

The last Bay Area Blawgers roundtable went well, so we're doing it again. Come on by, see all the blawgers. Bonus: you get to meet me!

Details are on Eric Goldman's site:

The High Tech Law Institute at Santa Clara Law School and Six Apart are pleased to announce Bay Area Blawgers 2.0, the second gathering of legal bloggers in the Bay Area. See a recap of the first gathering. This time, we'll spend an hour in a structured discussion starting around 6:15 (see some possible discussion topics). We'll spend the rest of the time schmoozing/chit-chatting.

When: November 5, 6-8 pm.

Where: San Francisco office of Fenwick & West, 555 California Street, 12th Floor, San Francisco, CA. Directions.

Who: Everyone is welcome, but this event principally will cater to active legal bloggers. People who have indicated they plan to attend: Tsan Abrahamson, Harry Boadwee, Brian Crossman, Robert Eisenbach, David Friedman, Sujatha Ganesan, Cathy Gellis, Eric Goldman, Joe Gratz, Beth Grimm, Chris Hoofnagle, Kimberly Kralowec, Matthew Lasar, David Levine, Tom Levis, Ethan Leib, Susan Nevelow Mart, Cathy Moran, Amy Morganstern, Deborah Neville, Dana Nguyen, Bruce Nye, Kevin O'Keefe, Jay Parkhill, Bertrand Pautrot, Aaron Perzanowski, Benjamin Reyes, Colin Samuels, Jason Schultz, Peter Smith, Tim Stanley, John Steele, Stacy Stern, Victoria Stodden, Gene Takagi, Chris Vail, Colette Vogele, Fred von Lohmann, Julia Wei and Cicely Wilson.

Cost: Admission is free, but parking is not!

CLE: This event qualifies for 1 hour of general CLE credit. Santa Clara University School of Law is a State Bar of California approved MCLE provider.

RSVPs: RSVP are ESSENTIAL for this event because of security procedures at 555 California Street. RSVP to Eric Goldman (egoldman@gmail.com ).

Edited 10/30.

I met a law student last night who felt somewhat nervous about the fact that she did not have a blog. Did she need to start one, she fretted.

It may surprise readers here to learn that my advice to her on starting one was somewhat tepid: only if she felt she really wanted to.

This advice is similar to advice I'd give to aspiring law students - only do it if you're sure it's what you want. Both law school and blogging have significant downsides; they should only be undertaken if there are sufficient upsides to balance out (if not also drown out) the bad.

I did note with interest a post I saw recently that was extremely enthusiastic about law students blogging. As a law student who did blog I appreciate the zeal, because the more people in the world who regard what I've done favorably the better off I am. In the past few years blogging, including law student blogging, has received increased respect, but there are still an awful lot of people who regard me as if I have two heads because I do so. If you're going to undertake a blog you are going to need to be prepared to deal with that kind of attitude, at least by having your own strong sense of why you think you should be doing this.

So I might counsel caution before taking that other post's unrestrained advice to heart. I don't think blogging is right for all people. However I do think the reasons in favor of blogging are valid for at least most. It's a chance to practice writing. A chance to build a portfolio of work. A chance to reflect on law. A chance to share what you know with other people. Etc.

These are all good things and my advice is anything but tepid in recommending law students pursue them. But they don't necessarily require starting your own blog. Indeed, having your own blog can undermine these goals. Blogs take work, both technically and in terms of audience nurturing. If you don't write, no one will read you and, worse, the audience you might have had will wander away. But if you write too often, you might write drivel, and the audience you have might had will also then wander away. Figuring out your own voice is a tricky thing to do, and remember you'll be doing it while you're also figuring out this new career.

Which doesn't mean it's not worth doing; it just means it needs careful doing. Including by pursuing other alternatives. Write because it's worth writing. Think about things because they are worth thinking about. And publish because it's worth publishing and telling people what you have to say - but find the appropriate avenues to do it. Send essays to traditional publications, for instance. Or perhaps submit guest posts to other existing and/or group blogs. Capture all the upsides of being a blogger while minimizing the downsides.

Of course, for some there is no substitute, and if you are one of those people my advice would be an unqualified "go for it." To own your own press, to be able to fully control your own communications outlet, to be able to directly connect with the world as you want to - these are wonderful things, the privileges of living in a free society where such things are allowed. If you can't imagine being satisfied with anything less, then by all means don't.