//Criminal Justice There are an ever-increasing number of crime blawgs entering the field each year. For our ’09 favorites, we looked to the ones that offered up original, thought-provoking posts on cases close to home and policy issues far and wide.
Blawg
Site & Twitter
Quick Take
NEW Crime & Consequences is, as Stephen E. Maher
wrote us, “most informative for the prosecution crowd.” As
the blog of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, posts often
focus on events or policies that interfere with the swift meting
out of criminal justice measures.
crimeandconsequences
.com/crimblog
Kent Scheidegger, the
CJLF’s legal director and
general counsel, is a regular
contributor to the blog.
Defending People is the hands on, nitty-gritty blog of
Houston criminal defense lawyer Mark Bennett. Bennett
doesn’t hold back as he shares his criminal defense practice
secrets, successes and worries with his readers.
bennettandbennett
.com/blog
Bennett was a religious studies major at Rice before heading off to law school.
@MarkWBennett
A perennial favorite, Sentencing Law and Policy doesn’t
disappoint. Ohio State law prof Douglas Berman offers daily
sophisticated reviews of cases in the news and headed for the
spotlight.
sentencing.typepad.com
If you can’t find Berman at
SL&P, you may catch him
teeing off at the Golf Blog.
World-weary as ever, Simple Justice continues to impress
because there are no sacred cows here. New York City lawyer
Scott Greenfield stays primarily on topic, with posts—er, make
that rants—about the latest criminal justice nuggets to draw his
attention.
blog.simplejustice.us
@scottgreenfield
One of Greenfield’s cases
inspired the true crime book
The Surgeon’s Wife: A True
Story of Obsession, Rage
and Murder.
The A-team at TalkLeft: The Politics of Crime—Jeralyn
Merritt of Denver, T. Christopher Kelly of Madison, Wis., and
Armando Llorens of San Juan, Puerto Rico—take a shamelessly
liberal view of crime and justice news and issues.
www.talkleft.com
When Merritt just has to stray
off topic, she spares her poli-tics-hungry readers and posts
at PopLeft.
//Lighter Fare It’s not that these blawgs necessarily lack legal substance. But we tend to visit them for laughs and a break from the ordinary.
BabyBarista offers an entertaining fictional account of a junior
barrister published by the Times Online. The blog’s author, Tim
Kevan, described “BabyBarista” to the U.K. news site This Is
North Devon as “a sneaky character who gets up to all sorts of
shenanigans in order to succeed. You wouldn’t like his behavior at all, were it not for the fact that BabyBarista’s opponents
are even worse.”
timesonline.typepad
.com/baby_barista
@babybarista
“BabyBarista” was anonymous until Kevan outed
himself in March for the purpose of promoting his book,
BabyBarista and the Art of
War, which came out in
August.
Bitter Lawyer is a category killer for legal humor websites,
complete with video programming, daily reports from the Bitter
Newsroom and frank interviews with lawyers with unusual stories to tell, such as the lawyer-founder of a dating agency for
marrieds looking to cheat.
bitterlawyer.com
@bitterlawyer
In September, the blog’s
Living the Dream webisodes
(retitled Bitter Lawyer) from
2008 were featured content
on Hulu.com. A second season is in the works.
ABA Journal BLAWG 100
