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Law and Liberty Turns 1!

apple-touch-iconLast year on January 11 Law and Liberty launched itself into the legal blog world and much else. Here’s the basic data on our successful 1st year: 980,000 Pageviews, 345,000 Visitors. This places us in the top 20 for pageviews among the Law Prof blogs and we’re right outside the top 20 for visitors. (We aren’t actually listed in the rankings because Law and Liberty isn’t edited by a law professor, and we don’t have publicly available data). So we’re fired up about the first year and even more excited about the year to come.

We’ve been led by the show-stopping wit of Michael Greve and his Erie Federalism and the significant edification provided by Mike Rappaport’s original methods originalism. Of course, as our renown grew we took on more fellow travelers. After I met Theodore Dalrymple in June at the annual Leipzig Bach concert fest,  he decided to join our ranks as a frequent contributor. At the hands of Dalrymple, democratic mediocrity never had it so bad. This was followed by the great Ken Masugi and David Conway, yet another Englishman, becoming regular writers as well. Their posts, apparently, frequently lead to heart palpitations for readers. But that’s a good thing, no?

Todd Zywicki has provided a veritable education on the cult of regulation embodied in Dodd-Frank and the auto bailouts. At just the right moment (just ask Bob Costas) Nicholas Johnson stepped in to provide regular commentary on gun rights and the insatiable demand to take away this paladin of freedoms. Many others have shared their expertise on this site and made it what it is. For that, we’re grateful.

So we’re a merry band trying to understand, diagnose, and sound alarms about present discontents in law, constitutionalism, and legal and political philosophy. It’s a tall order! But we also talk about the hope that the ideas informing law with liberty provide for the future. Ideas have consequences as Richard Weaver stated. If the deformation of reason and, in turn, law has separated man from the truth of his being and his freedom, then reason’s labor can correct much of the errors now masquerading as unshakable doctrine. There is surely no good reason, metaphysical, cultural, or economic for believing in our own doom. We’re realists, you might say, to a fare-thee-well.

Law and Liberty is here for the long-term and ready for another year of blogging, discussing, and debating ideas that flash, fizz, and pop, like so much progressive cotton candy and wonder bread. More importantly, we will be here talking about the ideas that have formed our dignified and free constitutional order. One worthy of a defense, if not a re-articulation. If you haven’t made us part of your daily reading, you should.

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