Professor Bainbridge...on law, politics, religion, culture & food

BusinessAssociationsBlog.com: A 99.9% Politics Free Zone

Dave Hoffman has a (typically) provocative post, in which he argues that:

It’s the news-hook that launched a thousand nominally law-related blog posts: the presidential election season! Surfing the vast blawgosphere tonight, it feels like every other post, on every other blog written by, and often for, law professors, is about the federal presidential election process. This, despite the often-advanced (in quieter times) view that the Supreme Court (the motivating issue for many posts) has little substantive impact on the issues that most Americans care about, despite a recent emphasis by progressive scholars on direct democracy and regional and state-led legal reform, and (sadly) the truth that law professors only rarely have novel or interesting insights about Presidential politics. (Bill Stuntz is an exception to this and many other rules).

It is particularly dispiriting that the election season threatens to make unreadable some of my favorite blogs, which now seem to be given over almost entirely to hashing of the latest scandal, speech, purported policy shift, or inside-politics joke. (I’d link, but I like some of these folks when they aren’t dressing up as Bill Kristol or James Carville!)

Dave’s rant is highly relevant to the motivation behind the current (and, presumably, permanent) structure of ProfessorBainbridge.com. I love blogging. It’s become a remarkably fun hobby. But I don’t think very many people, if any, share my eclectic set of interests in corporate law, wine/cooking, and the worlds of politics, religion, culture, and football. So I created three distinct blogs, each of which was intended to appeal to a very different audience. On the off chance that some folks would, in fact, share my odd mix of interests, I also created a portal page that offers a link to all three.

I’ve discovered I need a space to dress up (as Dave puts it) as Robert Parker and a space to dress up as Bill Kristol or James Carville. But I also don’t want to lose corporate law teachers like Dave as potential readers. In particular, I’ve found that I often have ideas about corporate law that would be of no interest to a general reader, but which my fellow corporate law academics (and, maybe even more important, the Delaware judiciary) might find of interest. I wanted to give those ideas a forum that would be a safe place even for the most die hard Obama fan in my readership.

Hence, this blog has been and will always remain a 99.9% politics free space. Short of becoming a meek and mild law-only blogger, which I’m unwilling to do, it’s the best I can do. So please keep reading (and buying my books!).