Self-Promotion, or Something

No, I haven't disappeared.

I've been away.  There were the days at a conference on sex offender laws.  There were the days at a conference on the death penalty.  There were a couple of days of vacation, hanging out with old friends in Texas and Toledo.

And as always when I'm away, there were the days catching up on the work that didn't get done while I was at conferences and R & R.  I've always said this was a hobby, which means everything else comes first.

And then there's this.  Over at MimesisLaw Scott Greenfield is gathering a few lawyers to write posts about criminal, er, "justice."  The collective is called Fault Lines, which isn't particularly catchy, but all the best suggestions were ignored (and Volokh Conspiracy was taken).  The idea, Scott explained at the beginning of June when the thing launched, is

people writing from varying perspectives, challenging bias and each other. We look forward to making this as real as it gets when it comes to criminal justice issues.

No, I don't know what that means either.  But Fault Lines has been consistently well-written and interesting.  I'm adding it to the blog roll.

But, and really, I do have a point here, Scott was concerned that all the writers he'd gathered were serious and just wrote straightforward stuff that any idiot could understand. Some were more critical of the courts and the cops than others, but they all seemed actually to believe in the Law.  So, and in order to bring things down a peg and add a dose of rambling and cynical pontification, Scott roped me into joining the thing.  

He said he needed a commitment for 2 posts a week. And he promised not to pay me.

How could I turn that down?  I said I'd sign on for a month and then we could reevaluate.

Monday Mimesis published my first post, Judge Kozinski and the Mystery of F.W. Murnau's Head. (I note that it seems not to be in the list of Fault Lines posts - a technological glitch that matches my skill set; Scott told me that my formatting "sucks," but over there I have a format editor to make it unsuck.)  The next post should be up there tomorrow.