The blogging judges

Galveston County Judge Susan Criss and her blog get a nice shoutout in the Chron today.

When Criss started the blog "As The Island Floats" in January she began it with warnings that she would not discuss cases before her. She also stressed that what she blogs cannot be taken to indicate how she might rule.

Criss, like Posner before her, started her adventure by filling in for another blogger. For Criss, it is was on the Austin-based Texas political blog "Grits for Breakfast." Posner said he posted on the "Lessig Blog" of a California law professor who once clerked for him.

Both judges said they simply obey the same rules they would speaking in any other forum.

"You can't just run your mouth so much that you'd be recused all over the place," Criss said.

Understandably, the few judges who write blogs tend to be jurists who write a lot anyway.

Criss, a journalism major in college, has written about her experiences for years.

"It's not for everybody. There's a lot of work, you have to keep up. But if I were not writing this I'd be sending it out in emails," said Criss, currently overseeing litigation over the deadly explosion at the Texas City BP plant.

As it happens, that's one of the reasons I was first attracted to blogging. I'd done a lot of writing on email lists, and now however many years later, that's all lost forever to me. Having a place that was mine where I could save and search through everything I'd written was a compelling lure.

So why might even more jurists take up the keyboard and blog?

As the Posner blog began: "Blogging is ... a fresh and striking exemplification of Friedrich Hayek's thesis that knowledge is widely distributed among people and that the challenge to society is to create mechanisms for pooling that knowledge."

Or as Criss explained: "To write about life and justice."

As long as people have stories to tell and feel a need to tell them, there will be blogs or something like them.

Posted by Charles Kuffner on March 15, 2007 to Blog stuff