Celebrating Ten Years of Opinio Juris (!)

It may be hard to believe, but this week Opinio Juris is celebrating its tenth anniversary. In a placeholder post prior to our commencing regular blogging, Peggy, Julian, and I had explained:

Our modest goal is to share with our readers a variety of perspectives on the role of international law in the U.S. and around the globe and to stimulate discussion within the community of international law scholars and practitioners. We will include useful links to other important on-line sources of information on international law.

We started blogging on January 10, 2005. On that first day we bantered with each other about UN reform (see 1, 2, 3), a topic that would come up time and again in the following years. Rereading some of my early posts makes me smile… and wince.  Although we were making it up as we went along, we were finding our voice. Ten years ago there was barely a blogosphere, let alone a legal blogosphere.

We knew we wanted this site to be a forum where people with a broad spectrum of views could discuss, argue, and analyze a wide range of topics related to international law. But if you want an interesting and informative conversation, then you better have interesting and informed discussants and editors. And so over the years Roger, Kevin, Duncan, Peter, Ken, Deborah, Kristen, and Jens joined the masthead, and An and Jessica joined as Assistant Editors.

However, the real reason this site has thrived is the thousands of people in the Opinio Juris community who are not on the masthead.  Each person who has submitted a guest post, participated in a symposium, taken the time to read a post, or added a comment to a post has made Opinio Juris the ongoing discussion that we hoped it would be.

Day in, day out, for a decade we have all participated in a conversation that has ranged over important topics, humorous observations, technical analyses, and politically fractious debates. It is a discussion that includes anyone who has taken a moment to read or write anything on the site. Thank you.

In our first week of blogging we had perhaps a couple of hundred visits (and I think a large number of those hits came from repeated visits by our relatives). But the conversation has grown not only through our expanding masthead but with hundreds of guest bloggers, over 9,000 posts,and nearly 26,000 comments.  We have tens of thousands of readers each month and a total of over five million visits (according to our platform’s counter).

Again, thank you. We are constantly learning from our co-bloggers, our guest bloggers, and commenters. These last ten years have brought much more than we ever expected and we are very grateful.

In the coming days we will post about the past ten years of international law as well as where it may be going. We will also point out some memorable moments from the first decade of Opinio Juris.

You can also follow us on Twitter, @OpinioJuris (we will use the hashtag #OJ10 for topics related to the anniversary).

We look forward to our continuing conversation…