Coming to You with Hat in Hand

We at Opinio Juris take great pride in the fact that we have never, at any point in our 17-year history, asked readers to give us money. Fortunately, despite rarely having been flush with cash, we have never needed to. None of the permanent members of the blog have ever taken a penny for their blogging (which means I’ve been paid $0/hour for my 2000+ posts), and our overhead has always been relatively minimal. All of our relatively meager funding — from advertising, from OUP’s kind early sponsorship, from our recent partnership with ICJ — has gone to either paying for web-hosting or paying Jessica for her yeoman’s work as our Managing Editor.

Well, consider our pride officially shelved.

2020 was a difficult year for us financially — as it has been for basically every human being and every organization on Earth. We do not expect the hardship to last more than the coming year, but we are quite desperate in the interim to keep paying Jessica. We would also ideally like to be able to contribute something to our two new, and quite amazing, Editorial Assistants. (About whom, more soon.)

So… our PayPal donation page is here. There is also a link on our homepage. If you could spare a few ducats for what I hope is your favourite international-law blog, we would appreciate it. And if you are part of an organization that would like to reach our tens of thousands of educated, sophisticated readers located in more than 100 countries, please contact us for our (quite reasonable) advertising rates.

To be clear, we are not facing an existential crisis. We will continue to plod along, enlightening the masses, even if no one contributes so much as a thin dime. So if you are choosing between giving us $20 and giving $20 to help the victims of war, famine, or other natural disasters, please give your money to them. But if you are lucky enough not to face that choice, every little bit you can give to us will help.