Over at SCOTUSblog, Tom Goldstein has a post introducing the new and improved SCOTUSblog site. The new site is sponsored by Bloomberg Law, and it will feature more commentary and a new approach to comments. From Tom’s post:
Substantively, we are continuing our transition to more expert coverage. Last Term, we published symposia with leading commentators, as well as coverage of individual cases from professors like Ronald Mann and Orin Kerr. This Term, we have commitments from many more prominent academics to take responsibility for merits cases in their fields of expertise. So we expect that the quality of our analysis will improve considerably.
Very soon, we are also going to be rolling a new “community” section in which we hope that our readers will actively participate. This is an evolution of “comments,” which we had eliminated several years ago.
Here is how the “community” will work. Rather than the traditional approach of opening up individual blog posts to comments, we will be presenting specific topics for discussion and debate. Every business day, we will introduce a new Supreme Court-related topic – such as a major decision by the Court – for discussion. Each topic will generally remain active for one week. We will be soliciting experts to participate in the community discussion with our readers. The best comments will be featured in a daily blog post.
To comment, you will need to log in. This involves a simple registration process, and all of the information provided during the registration process will remain confidential. Registration is not required just to read the blog or community posts by other readers.
Of note, we will heavily moderate the community for civility and substance (in the sense that the comment has to be substantive, not that we have to agree with it). We will delete comments and ban commenters when they fail to meet our standards. Our goal is not to limit or to manipulate the debate. But we will aggressively control its tenor and ensure that its quality is high. By “high” quality, we don’t mean that the comments have to be lawyerly or contain detailed legal analysis. Rather, they have to contribute to the discussion in some fashion, even if by asking further questions