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Stuart Buck of The Buck Stops Here [LexBlog Q & A]

March 27, 2008

The LexBlog Q &A interview series has slowly but surely been making it’s way through the list of bloggers featured in our July 21 post [“What was the first legal blog?”], trying to feature as many law blog pioneers as we can. So far we’ve gotten through about half of them, the latest of whom is Stuart Buck.

Stuart is a Washington, D.C. based lawyer and blogger who graduated from Harvard Law School in 2000 and currently an attorney with Kellogg, Huber, Hansen, Todd, Evans & Figel PLLC. He started his blog The Buck Stops Here in 2001 and – aside from a brief break, which he discusses below – has been writing for it ever since, offering frequent updates on a wide range of issues. You can see what this long-time blogger has to say about his experience over the past seven years, after the jump.

1. Rob La Gatta: When did you first hear about blogging, and how long after that did you start The Buck Stops Here?

Stuart Buck: I first heard about blogging when I came across Andrew Sullivan and Glenn Reynolds around August or September of 2001. I thought to myself, “I could do that,” and I started up my blog in October of 2001.

I had to stop several weeks later for the duration of my judicial clerkship, because someone (not my judge) thought that it was somehow improper for a law clerk to have a blog. Now, of course, blogging is more familiar: Judge Richard Posner has a blog; Judge Nancy Gertner contributes to Slate’s legal blog Convictions; and I’ve seen other federal judges commenting on the Volokh Conspiracy.

2. Rob La Gatta: How has blogging changed the way lawyers network with one another? Have you seen the results of this firsthand?

Stuart Buck: Lawyers who blog do find more opportunities to come into contact with other lawyers – whether readers or other bloggers – who are interested in similar subjects. I can’t say whether this ever translates into any tangible benefits (i.e., new clients).

3. Rob La Gatta: I’ve seen you write blog posts focusing on non-law related subjects, music among them. What compels you to cover non-legal issues in a law blog, and what kind of response has it generated from your readers?

Stuart Buck: Maybe I should resist the characterization as a “law blog”!  :)

I do blog about the law from time to time, but that’s never been my exclusive focus (as is the case with many other worthy blogs). Instead, I post about whatever strikes my fancy, which can be rather eclectic – education, exercise studies, music, sociology, history, etc. I do try to avoid current events or politics, because I don’t like to get sucked into spending massive amounts of time reading and thinking about things that are often trivial, tedious and gossipy.

4. Rob La Gatta: You link to an exhaustive list of your law review articles. Do you ever find yourself turning blog posts into law review articles, or vice versa?

Stuart Buck: Not so far. If I have an idea for a law review article, I’d rather write it up in that fashion rather than giving the idea away on my blog. Conversely, if I’ve written a law review article, it would take a lot of work to distill that into a series of blog posts. I do occasionally have reason to paste into a blog post some isolated point that I might have written about previously.

5. Rob La Gatta: If you were to start the blog over knowing everything you’ve learned in the years you’ve been blogging, what would you do differently?

Stuart Buck: I probably would have avoided ever trying to comment about current events, which I did more often several years ago.

Interested in hearing more? Recent LexBlog Q & A posts:

Or, see our full list of legal blog interviews

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