Ria Dutta explores how the First Amendment may interface with credit ratings, with an eye on recent activity by Standard & Poor’s.
Questions for the outgoing JLPP Editor-in-Chief Daniel Guzmán adapted by Sarah Hack from Marcel Proust, Inside the Actors Studio, and the Vanity Fair Magazine back page.
What is your current state of mind?
Anxious.
What is your idea of perfect happiness?
Waking up in the morning and thinking that I can’t wait to get to work.
What is your greatest fear about the future of law & legal writing online?
That some will use the medium as an excuse to reduce the excellence we demand in legal writing, with respect to argumentation, analysis, and form. Also, that some will mistakenly presume that our discipline is less rigorous as a result of its transmission through the internet.
What is your favorite blog?
This one. Seriously, because I know what goes into it. With respect to other legal blogs, I really don’t follow many of them because I find them fundamentally uninteresting, except perhaps Dorf on Law. (http://www.dorfonlaw.org/)
Which historical or living lawyer/judge/legal academic/legal person do you most admire?
Historical: Justice Thurgood Marshal; he was a trailblazer. Living: Justice Sonia Sotomayor. She’s also a trailblazer, and I met her once, and she’s very kind and always willing to give of her time. I also have a great deal of admiration for Neal Katyal and Seth Waxman for their appellate advocacy before the Supreme Court. And Cornell Law School Professor Sheri Johnson, who has been a tremendous mentor, confidant, and friend, in addition to being an unbelievably good lawyer.
What is your greatest extravagance?
Probably that I own a desktop and a laptop, and wish I had a newer version of each.
Law and Blog meet.
Law and Blog meet online, of course. So as you might expect, they are coy and are not particularly forthcoming with the details of their courtship. But once together, their relationship builds quickly — they share snark, irreverence and a proclivity for communicating and organizing bite-sized pieces of life.
Time passes, and Law and Blog find that their pairing has filled a deep expressional void. Law can finally cast off its Bluebook shackles and emote the way it deserves. And Blog cherishes the credence, utility and stability that Law provides.
Then one day, Law and Blog become bLawg.
The same love ditty that begat one bLawg, begat many. Law professors in particular, but practitioners, law students and interested others flock to the medium. From Above the Law to Dorf on Law —bLawgs are the antidote to and evidence of what is a true malady. Some of us crave escape from the strictures of formal legal writing.
The incumbent board of the Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy inherited a, well, a barely blog. It is a space carved out of the Internet terrain that has become our project to activate. “Kill it!” one of my law professors told me. And, no, we won’t yet, but a legal journal and a blog are not easy bedfellows.