Idea Lawyer Blog

San Francisco Bay Area eggs on its writer-lawyers. Two score and then some legal bloggers - a majority members of the bar, and several non-lawyers- convened this week to discuss blogging. Blogging is every monad's path to "self-publishing"- why wait for a staid and hidebound law review or journal, or to moonlight as a journalist and suffer editors, or hunt, spear in hand, paltry advance checks from wooley mammouth publishers, when one can cook up and promulgate any sort of stuff with the speed and reach afforded by "the web".
As varied as the wares of any corner news stand, some aim at headlines and circulation, with add revenue and a sense of competition with other mono-publishers. Some are activists, looking to expose injustice and trickery in the shady worlds of politics, corporations and power. Some scholars or academics, some business folk, some teachers, some educators, some public service-minded. Some are self-absorbed neo-narcissists, some simply egoists playing with another toy in a box of self-promotion geegaws. The symphonic Babel protected by Free Speech- cornucopia; gallimaufry; caviar and hash. Liberty sublime!
A current affair was pitched out for discussion: more "stuff" on the web than readers. The Sorcerer's apprentice is neck deep in self-replicating multi-media, a choking chaos of sound and fury signifying less to more.
A puny mew escaped me- an admitted desire to express something of enduring value- seemed plain-jane villein or cripplingly naive. A rustic woodcarver among legions of self-citing rapaciously linking Bots that persist and multiply in the Petri dish of cyberspace - a circulation with no lymphatic function. I flush - as cheery Abe Lincoln is reputed to have quipped: it is better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to speak out and remove all doubt.
And yet, decades ago in the last minutes of law school, I heard a voice: that of a competent yet, I confess, often dull to my revving motor-mind of the crass 80's, Constitutional Law Professor. Sending us out with shards of champagne on our hulls, he spoke of the "call to the Bar," of the profession of "Counselor" - a vital social role akin to physician and confessor. And the phrase that struck a persisting note: he enjoined us to "live a consecrated life." To use a verb form that did not then exist, if one should Google "consecrate" - one finds that to "consecrate" literally means "to set apart." A dedicated purpose.

Are the words of this old prof outdated rubbish? Mere pap to eager young JDs? And if not, in cyperspace, in cybertime, is it possible to "set apart" anything?