I’ve been asked by Anne Reed at Deliberations to compose a top ten blawg list, as she in turn was asked to do by the anonymous editor of Blawg Review, because she is “simply the best.” I can’t argue with that.

So, without further ado, and without replicating any blawgs on the two lists linked above:

1. Overlawyered – Walter Olson‘s blawg that needs little introduction, giving you the skinny on suits that should never have been brought, and politics from the Big Business side;
2. TortDeform – The polar opposite of Overlawyered, currently written by Kia Franklin and bringing you the consumer side of the equation. If you read one you must read the other;
3. WSJ Law Blog – Peter Lattman brings quirkiness to his employer’s staid personality;
4. How Appealing – Howard Bashman is the best aggregator of law stories around, even though the brand new ABAJournal is breathing down his neck with competition. The only bad part is I now have to root for his Phillies since my Mets choked;
5. Sui Generis – Nicole Black is the reigning Queen of New York blawgers, and the first to link to my little corner of cyberspace;
6. Simple Justice – I don’t even practice criminal law, but Scott Greenfield is such a great writer, original and funny, that this should be part of anyone’s must read list. You won’t see the mere repetition of someone else’s thoughts coming off his keyboard.
7. Real Lawyers Have Blogs – Kevin O’Keefe has provided plenty of tips on blogging, and should be required reading for anyone who wants to do it well;
8. New York Attorney Malpractice Blog – Andrew Bluestone’s blog covers cases from all over, and is great reading for examples of how lawyers get themselves in trouble, and serves as a constant reminder on protecting oneself;
9. TortsProf – Bill Childs supplies a never-ending series of stories about torts, making him a must read in the field;
10. Kevin, M.D. – Not a blawg you say? Dr. Kevin Pho hits the intersection of law and medicine with his aggregated medical content on a regular basis. The Bashman of the med-bloggers.

Bonus Blog – Not technically a blog, but a blawg search tool, Justia.com allows you to click on a category and then get an RSS feed for that entire category. Pretty handy if your RSS feed is filling up with so many individual blogs, and you want to see some of the more irregular ones that float about.

And so this meme is now passed on to the above. But don’t blame me for starting it.

Addendum:
I’ve also now been tagged by Kevin Underhill at Lowering the Bar, who was in my rough draft along with other legal comics at Quizlaw, Legal Antics and SayWhat? The problem, of course, is that once you start with the comedians you never know what will come flying back at you. (I’ve also been tagged by Nicole Black who not only runs Legal Antics, but Sui Generis.)

I could easily fill another post with more bloggers. I felt guilty about cutting Judicial Reports, Matt Lerner’s terrific New York Civil Law, and Thomas Swartz’s New York Legal Update, for instance, but I was already top heavy with New Yorkers.

And since I read so many personal injury blogs, I felt bad not writing about up-and-comers such as Hans Poppe, Ronald Miller or Perlmutter & Schuelke, especially since most of the blawgosphere doesn’t usually see them.

And I thought about tagging a Highly Trained Monkey, not because she has anything do with law, but simply because she hates getting tagged with memes.

So I could list another 10, but it wouldn’t be right.

Links to this post:

barack obama’s health care reform heats up while hospitals fail to …
during his last attempt to sway the ama doctors from the bully pulpit, barack obama gave lip service to patient safety, but did not elaborate. it’s not like he has no access to the information about the root causes of 200000 unnecessary …

posted by Tom @ June 23, 2009 2:30 PM

thanks to robert ambrogi
for identifying overlawyered as one of the top ten legal blogs. we’re invited to name our ten favorite. i’d be remiss if i didn’t identify point of law, our sister blog, but that seems poor sport. here’s my ten, though, of course, …

posted by @ October 04, 2007 6:21 PM

Simply the Best
There are a lot of blawgs out there, and we try to read ’em all. But if this editor had to pick, right now, the top ten law blogs he thinks are simply the best…the winners are: Above the Law; Adam Smith, Esq. Balkinization …

posted by Editor @ October 03, 2007 1:06 AM

The other day I wrote about two blogs with almost identical names — The Angry Pharmacist and The Angriest Pharmacist — and wondered about the intellectual property issues that would arise if such blogs could be shown to have real value.

And now...Angry Doc and The Angry Doctor.

And so, a word of warning: If anyone tries to take my name I’m gonna sic one of those angry medical people on you, because it may be more fun than suing. I don’t think there is any shortage in this department:

There is also The Angry Medic, Angry Scientist, Angry Astronomer, Angry Bear, An Angry Young Man, Angry 365 Days A Year, Angry Blog, Angry Chinese Blogger, and of course, Just Another Angry Blog. Not to mention an Angry Lab Rat.

It seems that, for some reason, AngryLawyer.com and AngryAttorney.com are still available, leaving me to scratch my head at the absence of righteous indignation in the profession.

But if you take one of those domains for yourself, please don’t tread on the grounds of the Angry Pregnant Lawyer, who’s been posting now for 33 months. So she clearly has a right to be pissed.

It had to come up eventually: Two blogs with almost idential names, and the issue of what intellectual property rights bloggers have to those names.

Here they are:
The Angry Pharmacist (started two years ago); and
The Angriest Pharmacist (started seven months ago).

Needless to say, Angry is not too pleased with Angriest, who concedes, “I did happen upon his site and loved it…so, I semi-jacked the name.”

The original is (can you guess?) angry about the poaching of his or her name.

Complicating the issue for The Original Angry is that he uses a pseudonym. Assuming he could find out who Angriest is and bring a suit, how can he ever prove he was damaged?

Now intellectual property is not my long suit, but I am curious since the same thing can (and most likely will) happen in the legal blogosphere eventually, where use of real names is the norm. After all, there are about 1,000 legal blogs but about 1,000,000 lawyers in the country, and the future blawgosphere (for us less talented people who can’t create pithy names) could look something like this:

The Podunk Criminal Law Blog;
The Podunk Criminal Blog;
The Podunk Criminal Law Blawg;
The Podunk Criminal Law Legal Blog.

I toss this out there with the hope that someone, somewhere, might have a few thoughts on this…

(Hat tip to Monkey Girl).