Blawg the summer job? Take II

My summer job starts today. I've thought a bit about all the commentary generated by my post last week about blawgging a summer job, but I'm still not sure what to say about it. Thanks to a fat link from Professor Kerr (that Conspiracy is a flow machine!) lots of people read the post and many chimed in either in the comments or on their own sites (or in comments on other sites). The response was nearly universal: Don't do it. While I understand where much of this is coming from and agree to some extent, I agree w/Cathy that law student and associate blawgs have a positive role to play in destroying the “black box” around the law. For example, I think the Public Defender Law Clerk is a great example of how this can be done. If he/she is hurting clients or his/her own future somehow, I'm missing something.

I also found much of the bandwagoning on the “don't blawg your summer job!” meme depressing for some reason. Although I know it was well intentioned, some of it was patronizing and failed to address the harder aspects of the issue, choosing instead to fall back on a blanket and simplistic “don't!” I understand that lawyers are risk averse when it comes to controlling information because that's part of their job; however, line-drawing is also something good lawyers must do all the time and much of the responses seemed to avoid that task.

That said, I do appreciate all the input and I'm still actually mulling it over. These are just some of the thoughts I've had about this and I'll be thinking more about this as the summer continues. As I said in that original post, I didn't write about anything last year that came even close to raising model rules issues (at least I don't think I did), and I don't plan to this year. I'll write what I can and we'll see where it goes....

Posted May 16, 2005 07:01 AM | 2L summer