We gotta tell you — we thought we were cheating last weekend.
Typically, we work hard — harder than it looks, we suspect — to add worthwhile content to the web with each of our posts. We root around for cases that look interesting, think about their implications, do a little bit of research, and try to say something worth saying. (We know; we know. We don’t always succeed, but we give it a fair shot.)
Last weekend, we took a day off. Instead of sweating bullets to find a substantive topic worth analyzing, and then analyzing it, we just identified blogs that are near our space on the web. Nothing to it: we listed blogs we already visit occasionally, looked at a few new ones, and linked to them. It was like a vacation day.
Lo and behold, our readers liked it. We’ve received a ton of comments (a couple on-line, but primarily off) saying that our little vacation day was one of the most useful things we’ve ever done. For some reason, it was helpful for us to canvas blogs in our neighborhood on the web.
Well, shoot, we like vacation days. Last weekend, we identified blogs hosted by product liability practitioners, academics in the fields of product liability and torts, and FDA-watchers. But we realized that there are really two other fields that overlap us in the blogosphere: we’ll call those “complex litigation” and Daubert. Our cases often involve procedural jockeying in class actions and mass torts, and the cases almost always involve a Daubert motion or hearing, so we cover those topics in our blog. And we have neighbors inhabiting those spaces on the web, too.
For complex litigation generally, visit the Complex Litigation Blog hosted by Gregory Joseph’s law firm. That site concentrates on identifying and describing recent cases deciding procedural issues. It’s a relatively recent entry to the blogosphere — just launched in January of this year — but the firm plainly commits resources to the site, with new content added very regularly.
A complex litigation blog with a narrower focus is the CalBizLit. Bruce Nye, of Adams Nye, devotes his space to analyzing business decisions in the California courts.
An academic site that we didn’t mention last week, but that’s worth an occasional visit, is the Civil Procedure Prof Blog. Frankly, we don’t care all that much about new ways of teaching civil procedure, but we do care about analyses of new procedural cases and the “scholarly round-ups” that let us know what the thinkers are thinking without having to spend hours actually reading all of that stuff.
Then there are the class action blogs. A fair number have already come and gone, and all too many are just websites fishing for plaintiffs. But a scant few are hosted by folks who actually read and describe (or, less frequently, analyze) cases for the benefit of the world. That category includes the CAFALawBlog, hosted by the gang at McGlinchey Stafford and devoted to cases and commentary about the Class Action Fairness Act of 2005. (On a personal note, last year one of your co-hosts (Herrmann) co-authored a law review article about CAFA with Bob Klonoff, the author of a leading casebook on class actions and soon to be dean of the Lewis & Clark Law School. The CAFA Law Blog graciously noted the publication of that article, saying that it had been co-authored by the renowned Robert Klonoff, and so was worth reading for that reason alone. Hey, guys, what’s Herrmann? Chopped liver? Gimme a break. But we’re linking to you anyway. We at the Drug and Device Law Blog forgive and forget.)
Two other blogs dedicated to the defense of class actions include the Class Action Defense Blog, which gathers class action cases in all fields of law, and Carlton Fields’ Class Action Blog, which limits itself to class action decisions in state and federal courts within the Eleventh Circuit.
Finally, Daubert. We’re surely missing some worthwhile sites that discuss this topic (and perhaps our readers will let us know what we’ve missed), but we know of only one site that tries to monitor Daubert and its progeny comprehensively. Blog 702 is hosted by Peter Norberg of Berger & Montague; his point of view doesn’t exactly mirror ours. But he has assembled a fairly comprehensive collection of Daubert‘s progeny in state and federal courts. We respect the effort that has gone into that project. And, who knows, someday he may even see the light.
We feel a little guilty doing a half hour of web-surfing and calling this another post. But we hope you find this as useful as you seem to have found last week’s post. And, as we’ve said, if we’ve missed any resources that are worth mentioning, don’t be a stranger.