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Saturday, January 25, 2014

The Volokh Conspiracy is already scaring the shit out of Washington Post readers

A magnificent legal blog, The Volokh Conspiracy, recently became affiliated with The Washington Post. Unlike this blog, the Volokh folks deal with weighty legal issues. They are law professors, and that's what they do. I'm a contract attorney, so I write about trivial shit in Temp Town. Plus food porn. And whatever. But not these guys.

Anyway, I assume they are now getting paid some decent coin by the WaPo, which is good. For them, at least. Not for me, really, because, well, the money goes to the Volokh guys, not me. But let's put that aside.

The Volkh guys apparently have already put scorpions in the underwear of WaPo readers:
A commenter on the post mentioning our new @VolokhGuns Twitter feed writes:

? I open up the “Saturday Morning Headlines” email and this is at the top. Is the WashPo going gun nut? They hired what looks like a teenage law professor? “Negroes and the Gun”?? What? And what the hell is a Volokh Conspiracy?
You go to read NEWS, and you get BIZARRE. That’s the internet for ya. Too bad it’s happening at the Washington Post. Yet another sign of decadence.
Exactly the reaction I wanted! Well, not quite, but it points to a reaction that we very much do want, and that is the main reason for our experiment with the Post.
This particular reader probably won’t be much receptive to our ideas, at least about guns. But people fall on a spectrum on this issue, as on others. There are those who already firmly agree with us. There are those that so disagree with us that they won’t be swayed.
And there’s a wide middle zone of people, on this subject and on others, who are open to hearing arguments — and facts — and who might be swayed by them. (I was one myself, before I started researching gun issues seriously in the mid-1990s.) But to reach those people, you have to be in the publications they read, with the credentials they respect, both our preexisting academic credentials and the credential of affiliation with the Washington Post.
The Volokh guys are hoping to put a little educating on the Post's readers. I hope they succeed. You should stop by. Their commentary on legal issues and court decisions of the day is absolutely must read. Even if they're doing it in the Post these days.

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