Play Nice

Apologies for the extreme time-delay in comment moderation--I am usually good at approving comments as soon as they are made, since my fingers seem to be attached to my keyboard. But between a heckish day of travel yesterday and running around town on various errands today and taking care of the children, well, I'm slipping behind.

So I disabled comment moderation. Play nice. I approve pretty much everything but the spam comments. Actually I can't remember why exactly I enabled moderation, except maybe that in the height of last year's LL.M drama I was worried that some of the dramatic French people who took issue with how I characterized our school's fundraising campaign (I think I may have used some really pejorative epithets like "indecent" and "extortion") would get all vindictive in the comments and give identifying details about me or my institutional affilitation. Instead, they just sent bizarre line-by-line responses using track changes in MS Word and really nasty letters (what is the opposite of "billet doux"?), so I guess I needn't have worried about being outed, as I was only pilloried.

Of course I approve all comments that disagree with me, even snarky or mean ones. I do ask, however, that you try to keep a civil tone, engage the issues substantively (while I'll approve "you suck, you dingbat" type comments, I just don't think they do much to further the discussion), and don't go psycho. The comments to the left are excellent examples of the types of comments loved by Law and Letters: interesting, substantive, civil, and often as long as the original posts--they're mini posts themselves! But don't be put off by the length. Pithy people are always welcome, and in fact, enviously admired.

Also, as my computer is being fixed by my engineer brothers, I will be much slower to post and slower to respond to emails for the next couple of days. But please do email me, stop by, comment, and and check out the continuing discussions!