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Print This PageSay It Ain’t So — Ken Anderson Takes A Break from Blogging
Professor Kenneth Anderson announced yesterday that he’s taking a break from blogging over at his Law of War and Just War Theory Blog. Although he says he’ll continue to post occasionally, the tenor of the message certainly sounds like a good-bye. I’m saddened by that news. I’ve never met Professor Anderson, but his was one of the first blogs I ever read (and was one of the reasons I jumped at the chance to start blogging here). Since then, I’ve become a regular reader of his work and considered his take on various issues relating to the law of war as it applies today a “must-read” (even though I didn’t always agree with him). In any event, I’ll go on record as hoping that his break is just that — a break.
On a more general note, the announcement did make me wonder about the future of the legal blogosphere; can one generalize this announcement as a sign that the legal blogosphere is really changing in new and significant ways?
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At risk of being a bit like Tom Sawyer showing up just in time to hear praises for himself at his own funeral, let me thank Duncan Hollis for the kind words, as well as all the good friends at Opinio Juris, and to those who have left me messages in the comments. I do hope to get a chance to meet you all in person one place or another.
I am not completely abandoning blog-ship – I will post stuff about things I am writing and maybe some other stuff. I might post the occasional topical comment at the Telos website. And unless the ASIL discussion on media stuff dis-invites me as an ex-blogger, I will plan to comment there in April on why I have decided to drop it for the present time.
Two things in anticipation of that. First, I think group blogs like Opinio Juris or Balkinization or VC are a better thing for people ostensibly blogging in professional areas like law – the group nature of the blog tends to keep people like me and our dilettantish propensities in check, tends to keep people like me more focused on the topic at hand. All by myself, I can’t manage to keep the serious, scholarly focus that you folks at Opinio Juris manage to do.
Second, pretty much by accident, I have been privileged to have some of the journalism world’s best editors over the years. Several of them have said more or less the same thing, viz, that blogging makes me a worse writer.
I admire the folks at Balkinization and Opinio Juris and Volokh Con who seem to be able to switch effortlessly between blogging and regular publication writing, but as my writer friends and editors tell me, in my case it seems to lead to flabby writing that is brief and unargued when it should be long and detailed, and long and chatty when it should be brief and tough.
I don’t know why that is, except that I find as a matter of prose that the blog plays to my worst temptations to instant publishing gratification and lack of re-write. I know that is not true for many fine law bloggers, but it does indeed tend to be true of me.
So I am going to take a little break from actual blogging, use this blog for posting up stuff that I am actually publishing, and see if I can recover both my prose style and my general sense of rewrite discipline. As one friend said, “Ken, I used to think of you as a polymath [which was entirely too generous of him but who am I to dispute that?], but to judge by your blog, I think you’ve slid from polymath to dilettante.” Hmm.
at 1:34 pm EST Kenneth Anderson