L.A.'s blawgs

The cover story in June's California Lawyer visits with lawyers who blog about the law. Among the locals included are, in order of appearance, Denise Howell of Bag and Baggage, UCLA professor Eugene Volokh of the Volokh Conspiracy, Jeff Lewis of the Southern California Law Blog and state appellate justice William W. Bedsworth, who sits on the bench in Santa Ana and writes a column at May It Please the Court.

As Howell wrote recently, "By publishing consistently and currently on your areas of interest, expertise, and practice, you cannot avoid being on the radar. A blog is the equivalent of a 20-person PR staff, singularly devoted to you. Better still, there's no room for the 'staffers' to misunderstand or misrepresent your message."

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Howell's blawg provides an excellent roundup of legal news and analysis, including discussions of copyright legislation, cases, conferences, and blawging developments. But she has also discussed the best online source of chocolate; the legal plots of Fox Broadcasting Company's new hit drama, The O.C.; how much furniture she had in her nursery (she was ten days from her due date at the time); links to another blogger's fairly long and fairly graphic birth story; and then, not surprisingly, a picture of Howell's newborn. That's the kind of personal touch that brings people back again and again.

But wait a minute: Is talk of television drama, chocolate, and babies professional? "Frankly, the law firm knows what I'm doing, and they see it as an interesting experiment in Web technology for lawyers," Howell says. "I'm very aware that the partners are reading it, so I don't put up anything that I wouldn't want them to see. But in real life I think there's not that much separation between lawyers' personal lives and their professional lives. We're all so involved in our jobs, and we talk about legal issues outside the office. Why maintain an artificial divide?"

The story could have also mentioned Professor Bainbridge, A Fool in the Forest, CalBlog and Patterico's Pontifications, which all write about the law in varying degrees. Hat tip on the link to Patterico.