Over at Stay of Execution, Scheherazade has a good post on the lessons to be drawn from Jeremy Blachman’s ability to draw a great deal of attention with his fictional blog about life as a law firm partner:
[T]he three big lessons for me are: 1) the blog as a medium has an inherent credibility. 2) Humans in general, and lawyers in particular, are amazingly susceptible to status and heirarchy — Anonymous Lawyer’s appeal was the perception of access to honesty from the upper stratus of the standard professional heirarchy, and the delicious way the author could make explicit all the power struggles and displays of status and power within a law firm. . . . 3) The profession really is draining talent, energy, and enthusiasm from a huge hunk of lawyers, which is a travesty. Anonymous Lawyer was fiction, but too many people recognized themselves in the mirror Jeremy held up.
Points (1) and (2) are also true for the academic twin of Anonymous Lawyer, the recently-launched Anonymous Law Professor. Fortunately — at least for us law professors — (3) doesn’t seem to apply to the latter blog. While Jeremy’s fictitious partner seemed real to many, the same character dressed up as a law professor was spotted early on as the creation of a law student (see here, here, and here).
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