A Note to Our Commenters

A short while back, we published two blog posts about attorney Arthur Alan Wolk. We did so because exercising and defending free speech is fundamentally what Reason is about. That especially includes the freedom to criticize lawyers, particularly when their behavior warrants it.

As a result, we are now facing another threat of a groundless yet potentially expensive and time-consuming lawsuit. We do not intend to retract our posts.

A small number of commenters – or more accurately, a number of small commenters—have repeatedly published comments on this site that, even though Reason has absolutely no legal responsibility whatsoever for the content of those comments, have made the situation we face only more difficult, more expensive, and more time-consuming. To those commenters we say: You are hijacking our resources, so please stop. As is our prerogative, we have deleted many of those comments, just as we regularly delete comments when it is brought to our attention that they are abusive, harassing, and add no value to the discussion.

As you all know, we provide an exceptionally open forum for discussion at Reason.com, one that you cannot find at most journals of political opinion or high-trafficked blogs. The behavior by these commenters is threatening our ability to keep comments enabled at Hit & Run. We do not have the resources to continue playing Whack-a-Mole and because we'd rather spend our time doing journalism than deleting comments, there will be none on this post, either.