Defending People

I’ve been tremendously honored lately to be mentioned in some of my fellow bloggers’ (Grits for Breakfast, Austin Criminal Defense, Deliberations [edit: and Simple Justice]) posts about the ten best criminal justice blogs. Scott at Grits [edit: and Scott at Simple Justice] included me in the list (Jamie at Austin Criminal Defense and Anne at Deliberations didn’t, but named me as a contender).

So now, having been tagged by Scott [edit: the Scotts] I should continue the meme by publishing my list of the ten best criminal justice blogs.

For the life of me, I couldn’t come up with a list of the ten best criminal justice blogs. I don’t feel like I’ve been around the blogosphere long enough to judge the “best”.

Here, though, are the eight criminal-defense-related blawgs I read most closely:

Gideon’s A Public Defender
Jamie Spencer’s Austin Criminal Defense Lawyer
Brian Tannenbaum’s Criminal Defense
Anne Reed’s Deliberations
Malum in Se’s eponymous blog
Scott Greenfields’ Simple Justice
Stephen Gustitis’s The Defense Perspective
Shawn Matlock’s The Matlock Blog

A few of the reasons that I give these blogs special attention:

• They are all in the same blogospheric neighborhood as Defending People.
• For the most part, they’re not talking about the water-cooler issues (though Scott went wild recently and posted about Anita Hill and Britney Spears in the same day).
• They are very specialized, and focus closely on their subject matter with thoughtful, original, personal posts.
• While that subject matter is inherently political, they aren’t spending a lot of time on partisan politics (though Shawn does likes to write about his imaginary Republicanism).
• They don’t have tremendous volume — four posts makes a heavy day for any of them.
• They are updated often (except for Brian’s).

Most importantly, though there is frequent interplay among them, in comments and responses to each other’s posts. The bloggers often disagree, sometimes vehemently, but there is a sense that they are engaged in a common venture, and that each of them can both teach and learn from the others.

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