PrawfsBlawg is ten years old.  It was already going strong when SJ was born, led by a law professor named Dan Markel who was murdered last year.  Even though I disagreed with Dan about many things, I respected him, and wrote about Dan’s ideas many times here.  But Prawfs lived on, and now it’s ten.

Most of you don’t read Prawfs.  It’s an academic blog, bogged down by the language, concerns and interests that are unique to the legal academy.  It’s not always thrilling, particularly for the non-lawyers, and it was often disturbing when the prawfs navel gazed in the weird vacuum of ivy towered self-indulgence.  It was especially frustrating when prawfs wrote about the value of their scholarship, or how the education of law students would die a brutal, painful death if law school wasn’t all about their law review articles and brilliant theory.

In the early days of SJ, I sought to bridge the gap between academic blogs and the practical blawgosphere, a phrase coined by Mark Bennett in a post that has apparently been lost to the ages.  At another law prof blog, Concurring Opinions, Dave Hoffman took a stroll on this bridge, but he never quite reached the other side.  Now, years later, we rarely see any cross-over. What once held the promise of synergy is now gone.

At the time, I tried desperately (likely too desperately) to chide the prawfs into engaging with practicing lawyers on real legal issues in real-life terms, rather than the sanitized theories that held the occasional kernel of truth expressed in words that were nearly incomprehensible to the practitioner’s ear.  Conflict erupted.  Lawprofs found it unbearable to have their babies called ugly.  Lawyers were incapable of using the mitigated language of the academy, murdering a thousand words to say nothing, and being far more concerned that no feelings were hurt than any ideas were clearly expressed.

The gap was never bridged, and so we each went back to our respective corners and did our things independently.  It was like toddlers engaged in parallel play, and the only time lawyers would tread onto scholarly soil was when they tried to take a dump on our world.  They hated it. We hated them for hating it. Nothing was accomplished.

But I have a confession to make.  I never stopped reading the law prof blogs.  Not just the ones that dealt with real world issues, if only from an academic perspective, like Eugene Volokh’s Conspiracy, but blogs like Prawfs as well. I rarely commented, both because I didn’t want to intrude on their playdates, and because I knew damn well they didn’t want me to.  It was their playground, and they are allowed to enjoy themselves without outside nuisances like me spoiling their fun.

But at ten years, some of the old prawfs have written about their experiences doing the blawg, one of whom, Paul Horwitz, did something that shocked me.  He told his story for real in a post called “No Country for Old Men.”

On this tenth anniversary of Prawfsblawg, I’d also like to think and talk a little about how blogging has changed in that period, at least from the perspective on one blogger. My answer is ” it has changed for the worse,” but I admit up front that much of this has to do with my own experience, and the simple fact of doing it for ten years.

My assumption when I started here at Prawsfblawg was that I would have a potpourri of subjects. Certainly I would talk about legal questions, especially those within my field of scholarly study. Certainly there would be a good deal of discussion of current events, generally legally oriented events, and the posts would sometimes be on the politics or substance of the issue itself and sometimes would be confined to legal analysis. And, as I noted last week, I assumed that there would be a good deal of discussion about the life of the law professor. I–and I think I wasn’t alone in this–that I would also write about pop culture.

This was supposed to be fun. This was supposed to be personal to the blawger, where we could indulge our interests.  After all, this was a blog, kind of a diary where the blogger’s thoughts and interests guided the path.

A lot of that didn’t happen for long.

I don’t know what Paul meant by “for long,” but it could have been hours, days, maybe weeks, before somebody was telling us what assholes we were for not writing what they wanted us to write about, or in the way they demanded we do it, using ideologically approved words or adhering to some grinning fool’s idea of best practices.  Whatever it was, it wasn’t ours.

I still read a lot of blogs and blog posts on these issues, including some whose writing I find vicious or overdone or self-parodic. Some of them have gotten much weaker in content, and I can usually limit myself to the headlines while avoiding one more sarcastic personal attack on this or that person.

I cringe to think that Paul’s talking about me, or someone like me. Not that I’m embarrassed by what I write, but I never meant to be an asshole, though I’ve surely been at times, and certainly from the perspective of a scholar.

All this has left me somewhat dispirited about blogging, especially given my dissatisfaction with online discussions, “news” sites, and so on altogether. No doubt some of these concerns and other factors, such as poor health, are personal to me alone and have nothing to do with broader trends or predictions. Others are more widespread, however, and so may suggest forthcoming changes, or an absolute decline, in legal blogging as a whole.

While the details differ, I totally understand and sympathize with Paul.  So you know, I quit blawging at least three times a day, every day.  I struggle with comments that are dangerously idiotic, and comments chastising me for my opinions, my tone, my language, my rules, my handling of readers who think SJ exists to provide them with a pleasing experience.  And then I wake up the next day and do it all over again.

I read Paul Horwitz’s posts, and find him to be quite brilliant, yet far more connected to reality than most academics, and less inclined to get hung up on pseudointellectual language than on the ideas behind them.  To the extent I’ve been the asshole he complains about, I apologize.  I know what you’ve felt about blawging over the years. I’ve felt it too.  There’s no country for this old man either.