I Taught the Law — Now Boosting!
Hello readers and writers!
It’s now over four years since we created I Taught the Law as a place for us to write and publish short articles (written by us and others) about the law, legal education, and the legal community so we wanted to take the opportunity to reflect on what we’ve done and what we are just starting to do.
I thought I’d start with why we created this online journal in the first place. Dan and I are both law professors and lawyers (former lawyer for me — it’s been a while). As legal academics, we write a lot but, at least for me, it was all academic writing — full of footnotes and very in-depth (i.e., long). And it spoke to the legal academic community, which is great, but it can be difficult to know if the work ever had an impact beyond a few citations in law reviews.
So we created this journal to be something different — the pieces are short, footnote free, and geared towards the public. Analytics and comments let us know that, for better or worse, people were reading these articles and had OPINIONS. We often write about things that upset us so of course readers also would get upset. Sometimes with us for our clearly wrong opinions. But still, that’s all good.
I Taught the Law also provided a place for people to publish who don’t usually have a place to do so — law students, legal professionals, even nonlawyers. We publish stories about hot-button issues and ongoing legal debates — it’s law plus history, psychology, arts, and so many other things. It’s been cathartic and educational to write and read so many amazing and often heart-felt articles. It’s been a real privilege to curate this collection.
Over the past four years, we’ve had ebbs and flows in how much we publish (well, I have, Dan is as steady as the tides. Dan, is that a good analogy? Feel free to leave an edit here) but we intend to keep going and working to build our list of authors and readers.
And that’s where the boosting comes in. We’re part of Medium’s pilot boosting program where we can choose a certain number of articles to boost to get a wider audience. We’re excited to give that opportunity to our writers. So, if you have something law-related (and that is a super-wide net), please submit and we’ll do our best to get you published. We usually do a light edit and turn things around as quickly as possible. In addition to boosting, we also publicize our articles on social media and can track viewers for our writers.
All of this is to say, we’ve had a great run so far and we’re looking forward to growing and boosting all kinds of law-related voices.
