On February 13, 2007, I was hanging around the house and getting in Dr. SJ’s way with whatever she was doing. To be rid of me, she suggested I start a blog, knowing how much I liked to write. So I did. Simple Justice was born.
As of today, SJ has 13,336 published posts, of which about 12,960 are mine. There are 300 drafts in the hopper, posts that I wrote (or at least started to write) and then decided not to post. There are 14,960,345 unique visitors and 170,781 comments after moving from my original platform at GoDaddy to WordPress when the original platform was discontinued in 2013. How many visitors and comments before the switch are lost to the ether.
I was a second wave blogger, coming after such luminaries at Walter Olsen at Overlawyered, Eugene Volokh at Volokh Conspiracy and David Lat at Above the Law. For a period, there was a robust corps of criminal law blawgers, most of whom have long since faded away whether from boredom with writing, the loss of eyeballs to less rigorous social media or the sense that they’ve written all they wanted to write. How many times can you write the same post about a dirty cop or bad decision on qualified immunity or the counterproductive ideology of the woke?
Nonetheless, SJ is still here and so am I, writing because it’s what I do, whether anyone reads it or I’m just murdering pixels for nothing. Is there a future where people prefer to read something longer or deeper than a twit? Is there tolerance for thought in a world where tribal allegiance and a chantable slogan are sufficient to establish one’s righteousness?
Where does it go from here?**
*Tuesday Talk rules apply.
**No, I’m not quitting, so let’s not go there.
