In light of the blogging here on the FLDS case, and its relevance to my area, criminal procedure, I thought I would say a word on why I’m not planning on blogging about the case.
There are two closely-related reasons. First, the facts are still unclear. In my view, the facts are everything in these cases; it’s hard to judge what happened when you don’t really know what happened. Second, cases such as this often trigger tremendous emotion among libertarians who identify to varying degrees with the targets. As a result of these two reasons, coverage of such cases usually emits more heat than light; folks often have extremely strong views even if no one really knows what is going on.
Some bloggers enjoy blogging in those situations, but I generally don’t — or at least I don’t unless I have a lot of time to delve into the details. With peak grading season upon us, I don’t have that time, so I don’t expect to blog on the topic beyond this meta-post.