Welcome to OrinKerr.com. My hope is that this blog will provide high-quality discussion and analysis of current legal topics, issues in the legal academy, and trends in the legal profession.
To ensure the highest quality comments, I have set up two ways to comment at this blog: with a registered account and without a registered account. Registered accounts are by invitation only, and permit an individual to post comments without prior review. I plan to invite a group of law professors, lawyers, law students, and journalists to register accounts. Inivitations will probably go out within the next week or so.
If you don’t have an account, you can still submit a comment. However, comments submitted by those without an account will not post automatically. I plan to screen comments by individuals without an account pretty carefully, so that only thoughtful and informed comments are posted.
If you’re interested in submitting an unregistered comment, you can maximize the chance I will approve your submission by offering informed legal arguments delivered in a careful, civil, and clear style. My plan is to offer registered accounts to individuals who establish a track record of submitting particularly good unregistered comments.
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Prof Kerr:
Best of luck.
You have my respect.
Armando at daily kos.
Orin,
Best of luck on your new venture. I completely appreciate what you are trying to accomplish with this new blog as I have many of the same concerns myself.
With respect to posting anonymously, I hope you will continue to allow it. I much prefer to post anonymously for several reasons, both personal and philosophical. In fact, if it were up to me, I would post without even using a screen name.
I know that using screen names creates a sense of community and somewhat limits bad behavior. It also, however, encourages people to become attached to their positions. I find it much easier to be objective and open-minded when posting completely anonymously — there is no loss of face in abandoning a position no one knew you ever held in the first place! Nor is there any psychological barrier to accepting a better argument, no matter how vociferously you may have argued with its proponent in the past.
On a blog such as this, the focus should be on the ideas themselves rather than who posts them. Each post should stand or fall on its own merit. As you’re planning on screening anonymous contributions this shouldn’t be a problem.
In regard to the comment from PrawfsBlawg, I don’t think it’s really possible for the “continent” of the blogosphere to ever fill up, as there’s no scarcity of internet real-estate. But there will certainly be winners and losers, with three models I think being capable of building and sustaining an audience.
1) The echo chamber, where dissent is unwelcome. Freepers vs. Kosmonauts. HuffPo. I can probably name a lot more without much effort, but the point of these sites is they are places where the “party faithful” (where party is not necessarily aligned with a previously established political organization) can talk amongst themselves about strategy, tactics and talking points. I’m not personally much interested in this, but it serves a purpose.
2) Thoughtful commentary and debate forums. All points of view are welcome, with rules of civility and respect enforced. Dealing with trolls and other abuse will be the main problem with stabilizing these forums, but systems of moderation do exist and have been used on a broad scale even in first-generation “blogs” like Slashdot, and successful sites will find workable solutions for their needs.
3) The topical news and opinion aggregator. Sites like LewRockwell.com. These kinds of sites tend not to have feedback, and when they do it is generally not of very high quality, so I’m not sure it’s really the same kind of animal at all.
I think sites which have and maintain one of these kinds of focus can succeed, but the group-blogs with a schizophrenic philosophy will tend to break apart. Unfortunately the VC has become something like this, with a vast difference in threads between, say, David Bernstein’s echo chamber and Orin Kerr’s thoughtful debate. They really do belong on separate blogs.
Best of luck here, Prof. Kerr. There’s now one more link on my blogroll.
As for abusive comments, it’s interesting to note that the “thoughtful debate” sites mentioned by Defending the Indefensible mostly use reputation management systems in which users are given rankings by moderators and other users. The comments can then be screened so that everyone can read their own “level” of commentary.
Sadly, I can’t find a WordPress plugin that might do this for you. The closest thing I can find is the TrollCap concept, with code to implement it here. It seems out of place on OrinKerr.com, but it makes me grin to think of implementing TrollCapping on VC.
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