There were two bad reactions in the blogosphere last week.  The first was the reaction to a post.  The second was the reaction to the reaction.  Both offer lessons.

The situation began with a post by University of Chicago lawprof Todd Henderson, who wrote at Truth on the Market (cached version of the original post, which Henderson subsequently deleted; more about that later) of the difficulty of surviving on a salary of $250,000 per year.  The point of his post was that the elimination of tax cuts for the “rich” wasn’t exactly limited to the “rich”.  Henderson explained how he could barely afford the gardener or the nanny.

In response, Berkeley Professor Michael O’Hare ripped him a new one in a post entitled, “The whining of the rich.” 

The next time you come upon a Chicago law professor in his scuffed Gucci loafers and tattered Armani on the sidewalk, holding up his libertarian down-with-government sign and shaking his tin cup to get his doctor wife and hollow-eyed waifs through another tough week in their million-dollar hovel, please don’t just walk by. Remember, it could be you. Be a mensch: throw a nice shiny 3/8″ washer and couple of nickel slugs in there, with my blessings.

And so the storm erupted.  Henderson initially removed his post, stating that while he stood by it, he had posted personal information that involved his family without his wife’s permission, and deleted the post to preserve their privacy.

In retrospect, it was a highly effective but incredibly stupid thing to do. The electronic lynch mob that has attacked and harassed me — you should see the emails sent to me personally! — has made my family feel threatened and insecure.

To my wife, my three children, and to anyone who was offended by my remarks, please accept my apologies. To those with pitchforks trying to attack me instead of my message, I feel sorry for you. You have caused untold damage to me personally. I may be wrong, even stupid, but I don’t think I deserved that.

Henderson offers no examples of the personal attacks that caused him “untold damage,”  It would come as no surprise that many who are forced to survive on a mere $200,000, even less, were unhappy about his post.  Maybe some, even many, sent him emails that called him horrible names and told him that they thought bad things should happen to him.  If the comments to his post are any indication, they were no doubt vicious, and it was probably very unpleasant to be Todd Henderson.

It was more than Todd Henderson could take.  Rather than face the heat, Henderson quit.

But as Kashmir Hill writes in Forbes, tough nuggies.

I must say that while strong opinions are rewarded on the Internet, so is thick skin. Personal attacks come with the territory when you write online.

It’s a shame that Henderson is e-retiring. But maybe with the extra time he’ll have not blogging, he can find some odd jobs to make more money for that potential tax increase.

The verity of the blawgosphere depends on both of these things, the ability to say what you believe, and the will to take the heat for it.  Henderson had the former, but not the latter. 

What makes this bang-up particularly instructive is that it happened in the academic blawgosphere, where subtlety and nuance reign supreme.  Usually, the harshest thing anyone ever writes is that another prof’s post is “curious”, meaning that it stunk to high heaven.  They have an entirely different vocabulary, where never a negative word is uttered.  To see this sort of harsh rhetoric was, well, unimaginable a short time ago.  The wall of gentility and civility has collapsed.

In the practical blawgosphere, once inhabited by practicing lawyers who were used to the rough and tumble of court battles and capable of standing their ground when faced with a frontal challenge, this would have been taken in stride.  This wasn’t a world populated by hand-wringing sissies, happy to throw a punch but unable to take one.  We said what we meant, and we took the heat for it.  When it turned out we said something stupid, we were tough enough to admit it.  Either way, we didn’t cut and run. 

As the academic blawgosphere gets rougher, the practical blawgosphere has, curiously, gotten softer, collapsing under the weight of shameless self-promotion, cowardice and disingenuousness.  We used to call the lawprofs teacups, but they’ve gained an appreciation of integrity that used to belong to the practical blawgosphere.  It looks like the joke’s on us.