Several people wondered whether I would stop blogging when I came to Northwestern. Speculation that this would happen increased after I, well, stopped blogging. But then I came back! What’s more, colleagues here at NU are now joining the blogosphere!* Two of my colleagues are among the founders of Controlling Authority (get it?), a zippy new legal studies blog.
I’m a bit amazed that I blogged by myself for more than four years before figuring out how much more fun a group blog is. I had the theory that eventually everyone with a group blog would figure out they might as well have individual blogs that everyone would read via RSS rather than check in their browsers, as when you read on RSS you don’t care how often people update. However, as with so much else in this world, I was wrong.
In their blogroll is the Empirical Legal Studies blog, which I check out from time to time. I’ll admit to being kind of fascinated with the phrase “empirical legal studies,” which in many ways seems interested in bringing to law the same kind of thinking behind the “evidence-based medicine” movement in medicine. And yet, something about the phrase “evidence-based law” doesn’t ring quite right.
* BTW, it’s NU. NU is the abbreviation for Northwestern University. NW is a compass point, not a place to send your kids to college.
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I like their tag line, tho — bringing methods to our madness — that’s funny bother.
now everyone go to my new blog and make funny comments. it doesn’t mean you don’t LOOOOVE scatterplot. It just means sometimes you like the law. and, random thoughts and just silliness. and yes, i have been trapped in my house too, too, too long today at -15
LBN: I came up to campus today, where a big part of my plan was to start reading a student’s dissertation, although that plan was promptly thwarted when my printer ran out of toner. Am I right that we don’t have access to the room with the grad student printer?
Oh cool re the blog, David is a former student of mine and former RA.
My understanding is that NU Law is at the forefront of having faculty that’s engaged in empirical research largely due to the relatively high proportion of PhDs. The Dean wrote a piece [pdf] related to all this.
As to NU, people often write NWU. I think that’s fine the first time, after all, why should folks know we go by NU. But I find it a bit annoying when I write back and refer to it as NU several times only to get NWU again in the response.
I find it a bit annoying when I write back and refer to it as NU several times only to get NWU again in the response.
Just put “NO NU NOT NWU” in your email sig.
Might people write NWU to differentiate it from other possible NUs out there?
For this kind of blog, multiple authors are fine but for personal blogs, it’s confusing. I read everything via RSS so infrequent posting is fine by me. Am I now in the minority?
I find it a bit annoying when I write back and refer to it as NU several times only to get NWU again in the response
It only switched from nwu.edu to northwestern.edu about 5 years ago, from early 1990s to then it was nwu. It’s not unreasonable to still think of it as NWU, no? I mean, I still think of Altria as Philip Morris, and Apple as Apple Computers…
It’s not unreasonable to still think of it as NWU, no?
As I (thought I) said, I think it’s completely reasonable for people to have no idea about this whether it was NWU or not at one point in time. (Although they started phasing out the nwu.edu domain in 2000, it was operational until 2004.) My point was that after seeing a Northwestern person refer to it as NU several times, people might realize it’s NU not NWU.
I find it a bit annoying
“Annoying” was probably not the right word to use here since I certainly didn’t mean “earth-shatteringly annoying”.
I don’t myself have a problem with NWU, even before knowing that it used to be the name of the school’s domain. It’s just NW that I don’t like.