Power, Responsibility

 Posted on October 21,2009 in Uncategorized

As if it were not humbling enough being, on my very best day, the fourth-smartest mammal in the house, I've got this blog and my loyal readers to remind me of my modest position in the universe.

If I were afraid of making mistakes, I'd never get anything done. Life and the practice of law, like walking upright, are continuous series of controlled falls that take me to interesting places to help people. Most of the mistakes a) are harmless; b) are easily corrected; and c) lead (by successive approximations) to a good result:I do a good job for my clients not despite my errors but because of them.

This blog, however, is a little different. For whatever reason, it has become ludicrously powerful (for what it is). When I get something wrong here, it can hurt people in the real world and (thanks to Google's caching) the damage might not be easily fixed despite my best efforts.

This ain't exactly journalism (surely you realize that), but the journalists have been dealing with this issue for as long as there has been journalism. I'm still working on how best to deal with it here.