The Random Law Review Experiment

Looking back over my posts for the past year, I see I've spent a lot of time on a couple of my favorite things (comics, gaming) and only a little on one of my other major interests, legal scholarship. I doubt there are many blogs that appeal simultaneously to both pop culture junkies and law profs, but a guy's gotta write about what he likes.

I think the main reason I don't talk much about legal issues is that I'm by nature quite cautious about offering opinions. I like to do loads of research and thinking before writing down what I think the right approach should be, and most of my energy in that field goes towards my dissertation. At the same time, it's probably not healthy for me (career and intellectual-development wise) to become too narrowly focused on an obscure sub-field like the history of Canadian blasphemy law. Ideally, a good general knowledge of what's going on in various fields helps to make connections that apply from one to another and establishes a better "common sense" or "guesstimate" about what courts will do in a given situation.

To this end, I plan on occasionally reading and discussing truly randomly-selected law review articles. An odd idea, I know, but also kind of a fun one, as I never know what I'm going to end up with. The selection process is based on a combination of Hein Online and the Random Number Generator--a randomly generated number between 1 and 26 gets me the first letter of the law journal title, and a second randomly generated number gets a specific journal (excluding ones that have stopped publishing) and I'll then read the most recent article available.

If nothing else, I may pick up some more obscure topics I can write about once I'm done with blasphemy . . .