Goodbye to Overlawyered, Perhaps the Longest-Running Law Blog

Walter Olson (Overlawyered) is hanging up his spikes at the end of this month, after nearly 21 years of blogging.

[Overlawyered is] the longest-running general interest law blog anyone has been able to identify. It's one of the monuments still standing from the heyday of individual blogging on current events and public policy, a sector that bloomed after 9/11 two years into our run.

It has been a pleasure beyond compare to write it. But blogs that publish every day (and with only a few exceptions, that is what Overlawyered has managed to do for all these years) are extraordinarily time-intensive for a single author, and my time is constrained.

Be assured (if you count this as assurance!) that I am not going anywhere. I look forward to continuing my writing as a Cato senior fellow both at the excellent multi-contributor blog Cato at Liberty and at many other outlets. One reason I'm making this decision is that I'm eager to step up the pace of this other writing at a time rich in policy challenges.

Even in its early years Overlawyered had a much broader range of interests than its name might imply. It covered (and still does cover) wacky lawsuits as well as the more serious side of litigation policy but also many areas of writing interest of mine such as free speech and business regulation. Especially since it came to Cato ten years ago, it has continued to branch out into such areas as constitutional law, criminal justice policy, and state and local policy. But at heart it has always been a blog about law in America.

Overlawyered is one of the blogs that, together with InstaPundit, helped prompt me to start blogging myself. I'll miss it.