Welcome to my new venture.
I’ve been writing online for a long time — first on various obscure forums and bulletin boards, then for nearly 12 years at www.popehat.com (where a lot of my writing remains), and then, increasingly, on Twitter.
Twitter’s fun. There’s something appealing about the limitations of the format — it’s a challenge, like composing a haiku. But the more self-parodying 20-tweet lawsplainers I did, the more I thought that I should be writing them in a better and more accessible format.
What is the Popehat Report about? Well, the Popehat blog was subtitled “Law, Liberty, and Leisure,” which is a fair summary. As a criminal defense attorney, civil litigator, and writer and podcaster on legal issues, I’m fascinated by the intersection of law and society. How does the law work, compared to how it’s supposed to work? How does law shape culture and vice versa? What surprising things do most people not know about the rules that bind them, the rules that nominally reflect their will? How do our rules, both in their text and in their application, compare to our stated ideals? How do those rules govern our lives in both obvious and inobvious ways? How does it change the way the rules work when we are widely aware of them, or widely ignorant of them? What’s funny, inspiring, appalling, or terrifying about the life of the law?
There will also be plenty of lawsplainers. Law permeates everything, yet we have a terribly limited grasp of it, and our educational system does an inadequate job to prepare us to figure out what’s going on. I’ll try to shed light on a small corner of it.
In short, this newsletter will be about the same things I have written and tweeted about before. As Lincoln probably did not say, “for people who like that kind of thing, I think that is just about the kind of thing they’d like.”
After a while I will turn on paid subscriptions. Some of the content will be free; some will be paid. Maybe about 50/50. We’ll see.
Welcome.
—Ken
In the meantime, tell your friends!