Fifteen Years of Legal Planet

5700 blog posts later, we’re still speaking — if not “truth to power”— then our best approximation of truth, to anyone who’ll listen.

A decade and a half ago, the law school here announced the launch of a new environmental law blog by Berkeley and UCLA. The March 11, 2009 press release began:

“The University of California, Berkeley, School of Law (Berkeley Law) and UCLA School of Law today announced the launch of a new blog, Legal Planet, which provides insight and analysis on climate change, energy, and environmental law and policy. This collaborative blog draws upon the individual research strengths and vast expertise of the law schools’ think tanks and legal scholars.”

I should probably note while March 2009 was the official launch announcement for Legal Planet, we did some trial blog posts going back to January of that year. I guess you could call that the beta version.  And as long as we’re clearing up the record, I’d like to credit Areca Sampson, then CLEE’s administrator, for suggesting the idea and coming up with the name of the blog.

A follow-up story in August was entitled, “‘Legal Planet’ Successfully Orbiting the Blogosphere.” I suppose we’re still orbiting, beeping signals down to Earth.

The co-founders of the blog were me and Ann Carlson, my longtime coauthor on the environmental law casebook (and now recently returned from a stint in the Biden Administration).

In terms of our goals, here’s what the press release had to say:

“Legal Planet co-creators Farber and Carlson said the site fills a unique space on the blogosphere, not only by bridging the worlds of law and policy, but also by translating the latest developments in a way that’s understandable to a mass audience. The ‘global challenge of climate change’ is the driving force behind the blog, said Carlson.”

The part about the “mass audience” was perhaps a little overly optimistic. But by academic standards, we’ve done pretty well, with close to 2 million total views.  (It looks to me like the counter reset after we redid the website and changed URLs, so the true number could be quite a bit higher).  And I think we’ve done pretty well in achieving the goals we set out fifteen years ago.

So here’s to the next fifteen years of Legal Planet!  And as a gentle reminder, this is a direct link where you can subscribe to the Legal Planet daily email newsletter.  Or just look for the “subscribe” button on the upper righthand corner of the page.

We still haven’t given up on getting that “mass audience.”  So tell your friends about us!

academic, Berkeley, CLEE, Emmett Institute, environmental blogs, Legal Planet, UCLA