Walter Olson founded and (with Ted Frank) continues to publish Overlawyered.com, hailed by CourtTV as “the hub of all things legally absurd on the Net” and by Dave Barry as “always fascinating”. A senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, the Gotham-based think tank, he is the author of three acclaimed books on the American legal system: The Litigation Explosion, The Excuse Factory and The Rule of Lawyers. His work appears frequently in outlets such as the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times Book Review, and he recently launched a column on law at the Times Online (London). He lives and writes in the New York City area, and — contrary to the assumption of innumerable readers over the years — is not a lawyer.
Simon Owens: As a blog that focuses on legal matters, what do you think about the recent rulings of the Supreme Court on Guantanamo Bay? Do you agree with the Court’s decision?
Walter Olson: I have the luxury of choosing which legal controversies to keep up on, and I decided to leave that particular controversy to others.
Simon Owens: Would you agree with many political pundits that Supreme Court members tend to become more liberal after they’ve been nominated to the position?
Walter Olson: That’s an unmistakable tendency, although many of the Republican-nominated “disappointments”, such as Stevens and Souter, were never particularly conservative in the first place. I’d say the major phenomenon here is that many GOP presidents before the current one were only fitfully aware of the ideological stakes in their selections, or knowingly picked moderate nominees for a variety of reasons, as did Reagan with O’Connor.
Simon Owens: Do you feel that many political bloggers don’t understand the law well enough to accurately critique it?
Walter Olson: Sure. At one level, there are always commentators whose only question is “Did the good guys win?” and don’t seem to grasp that judges sworn to uphold the law must often rule in favor of the not-so-good-guys. At a somewhat higher level of sophistication, commentators will complain the other side won on “technicalities”. Often, though not always, Jason’s mere technicalities are Janice’s essential elements of due process: the proof must line up with the indictment, time limits on the process must be respected, etc.
Simon Owens: As someone who’s written and published three books, which do you prefer more? Blogging or book writing?
Walter Olson: Blogging provides not only instant gratification, but also an immediate knowledge that your efforts have not been wasted. In book writing, it’s not uncommon to spend weeks or even months on blind alleys and on sections that never make the final cut; the finished book needs to have a certain “shape” and you can’t foresee going into the project exactly which ideas will work and be necessary in advancing the argument and which won’t. Books are analogous to architecture — one plants a concept in Chapter 2 that will prove important in Chapter 10 — while blogging is more like paddling along a whitewater stream, where the scenery changes constantly and you try to keep your passengers from falling overboard.
But actually, one of my aims with Overlawyered from the very start (I launched it in mid-1999, practically Bronze Age as policy weblogs go) was to bridge the gap between the two kinds of writing a bit by keeping the site’s archives constantly in mind and sometimes “writing to the archives”, i.e., doing posts whose main point was to set up bits and pieces of stories that I intended to return to later. I still put a lot of emphasis on pulling together series of past links so as to make the site more useful to researchers who may be visiting years later. That is one reason the site has kept its following in the mainstream press, I think.
Simon Owens: Do you think that more and more mainstream news outlets will start hiring bloggers for their websites?
Walter Olson: They already are doing that, but try to understand the layers of inhibition they have to strip away to get to that point. Mainstream news outlets have historically prided themselves on not putting out copy that has not been run by multiple sets of eyes, and at sharing responsibility in other ways as well (if you get a brilliant idea for a piece you don’t just start writing it, you have to sell it to the editors). Behind all this is not just a dread of being factually wrong, but a suspicion of the quirkiness and blind spots of all individual writers, as well as their tendency to overvalue their current project (what do you mean this isn’t page one material?). There are real advantages in the old model and I don’t blame them for being conservative about not wanting to abandon it until they know more about how new systems work.
Simon Owens: What are the five blogs you’d recommend to supplement the reading of your own?
Walter Olson: The perfect supplement is Point of Law, a blog I edit for the Manhattan Institute in which I and a half-dozen other regular contributors tackle some of the same societal phenomena as does Overlawyered, but often in more detail and with more of an eye toward practical reform. Easily my favorite blog on wider legal issues is the Volokh Conspiracy, a group blog mostly of law professors with a libertarian bent. The Wall Street Journal law blog, by Peter Lattman and others from the paper’s news side, is a good example of how a major media organization can quickly make itself part of the discussion. If you’re looking for a blog from the opposite point of view from Overlawyered’s, try Notes from the Legal Underground, by Illinois trial lawyer Evan Schaeffer, who brings a generally light touch to these often super-contentious matters. Finally, Kevin Pho finds and links a steady stream of interesting medical news, including news from the medical-liability wars, at KevinMD.
(Related posts: Interview with Xoverboard, Inteview with Talk Left)
