Robert Ambrogi's LawSites

Supreme Court watchers usually set their sights on the first Monday in October. This year, however, they might want to pay attention to the last Monday in September. On Monday, the preeminent Supreme Court blog, SCOTUSblog, will unveil a new look and some new features. SCOTUSblog has long stood out to me as among the best [...]

A group of 18 soon-to-graduate Harvard Law School students so fear the approaching loss of “the discussions we’ve had over bagels and coffee” that they have started a blog in the hopes of perpetuating their exchanges, if only virtually. The blog, Just Enrichment, is wide ranging in its coverage. In less than a month of operation, its topics already cover a range that extends from online poker and labor unions to sex equality and burqa bans.

Like any self-respecting group of bloggers, they are also on Twitter as @justenrichment.

[Hat tip to Orin Kerr at The Volokh Conspiracy.]

Here are four new blogs of interest to legal professionals:

• Summary Judgments. From Loyola Law School in Los Angeles comes this blog, which will serve as a clearinghouse for faculty commentary on a range of issues and highlight faculty scholarship. The blog kicked off the new year with “11 on ’11,” a series of posts in which professors are forecasting what lies ahead in 2011.

• Letters Blogatory. If you are enough of an international law geek to deal with letters rogatory, then this is the blog for you. Its author, Ted Folkman, a lawyer at Murphy & King in Boston, says his goal is to provide a practical resource for practitioners to keep up with developments in international law.

• Retail Law Observer. The law firm of Crowell & Moring in Washington, D.C., publishes this blog, devoted to covering legal issues and key trends facing the retail industry. Topics will include property leasing and development, labor and employment, consumer protections and bankruptcy.

• Legal Skills Prof Blog. Another addition to the Law Professor Blogs Network, this blog aims to provide a forum for discussion among the law professors who teach legal skills, the practitioners who hire their students, and the students themselves. The blog’s editor is James B. Levy, associate professor at Nova Southeastern School of Law. Among the contributing editors are two non-academics who are well-known legal bloggers, Dennis Kennedy and Tom Mighell.

Several legal blogs of note have launched recently:

• The ZRG Blog. For roughly a decade, legal researcher Andrew Zimmerman has published Zimmerman’s Research Guide, an online encyclopedia for legal researchers. Last month, he launched this blog to keep his readers informed of updates to the guide.
• In Custodia Legis: Law Librarians of Congress. Launched this week by the Law Library of Congress, this blog will feature a team of bloggers writing about current legal trends in the United States and elsewhere, developments and enhancements to THOMAS, and cultural intelligence and the law.
• CaseClothesed. Created, edited and run by students at New York Law School, this blog covers fashion law and offers a legal perspective on developments in the fashion industry.
• Legal Divas Blog. Four women partners with the law firm Bowman and Brooke write this blog focused on diversity law. The blog is intended as a resource for women in law and other professions to keep them up to date on best practices, benchmarking, current issues and trends that impact women in leadership, business and law.
• Crime In The Suites. From the Washington, D.C., Ifrah Law Firm, this blog covers white-collar crime, DOJ enforcement, federal sentencing and similar topics. Contributors include the firm’s founding partner, Jeff Ifrah, and several associates.
• California Corporate & Securities Law. Keith Bishop, a partner with the California law firm Allen Matkins, covers California securities laws and regulations, corporate governance, the California Department of Corporations, the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, the California Secretary of State, pending legislation and rulemaking, quirky California laws and other topics.

The Law Library of Congress this week unveiled a Web archive of legal blogs. The library began archiving selected legal blogs in 2007 and now has archives for more than 100 blogs covering a range of legal topics.

It appears to me that these archives are periodic snapshots of each blog rather than complete collections of the blog’s posts. From this page, the collection can be browsed by subject, blog title and author name. The page also provides searching, but only of the blog’s bibliographic information, not its full text.

The American Bankruptcy Institute and St. John’s University School of Law have teamed up to launch the ABI Bankruptcy Case Blog. The blog is written by the student editors of the American Bankruptcy Institute Law Review at St. John’s and promises to deliver in-depth research on cutting-edge bankruptcy issues. “Each entry is the product of extensive research and constitutes a succinct analysis of the issue and holding of the particular case, how that issue is situated in the larger discourse of bankruptcy law, adn why the case is important.”

[Hat tip to Consumer Law & Policy Blog.]

The attorney general of Massachusetts, Martha Coakley, has launched a blog called At Issue & In Focus. The introductory post says:

This blog is designed to help residents to understand and participate in the work of their government. We will strive to address topics relevant to the broadest possible audience and will grow to include all the areas in which the work of this office affects Massachusetts residents, including consumers, families, businesses and others.

The AG’s office now also has a Twitter feed and an official YouTube channel. A statement of the AG’s Web communications policies says her use of Twitter “is intended as one-way communication” and the office will “not respond via Twitter to press inquiries, consumer complaints, or other constituent matters.”

Two new legal blogs worth noting:

• The Alexandria, Va., intellectual property law firm Oblon, Spivak, McClelland, Maier & Neustadt has launched a blog devoted to IP disputes before the International Trade Commission. Its new ITC Law Blog will cover new filings and recent decisions and also provide practice pointers.

• The Boston-based law firm Foley Hoag has Security, Privacy and the Law. It promises to provide “a candid discussion focused on developments in the law of information security and privacy.” Topics to be covered include data breaches, identity theft, protection of financial and medical information, and relevant legislation and regulation.

In response to various competitions and rankings of the best legal blogs, the Avvo Blog has created an auto-updating list of the top 300 legal blogs, ordered by their traffic rankings as shown by Web information company Alexa. Because the list is regularly updated, the rankings vary. At the moment, this blog, LawSites, is ranked at #30 and a blog I co-author, Legal Blog Watch, is ranked #24. The two top-ranked blogs are Above the Law and The Volokh Conspiracy.

The Boston personal-injury law firm Breakstone, White & Gluck has launched Massachusetts Injury Lawyer Blog. The founding partners of this firm, Marc L. Breakstone and David W. White, are highly regarded trial lawyers in the state with an impressive record of verdicts and settlements (not to mention long-time friends of mine). White is a former president of the Massachusetts Bar Association. White writes that the blog will cover news and developments in the field and will discuss “meaty” issues of law, procedure and important cases.