A Reader's Guide to Above the Law

A new website, like Above the Law, can take some getting used to. And we’re still working out various glitches and kinks. Please bear with us, and please give us your feedback about any problems you encounter; it’s very helpful. (And yes, we are considering a font overhaul. If you have views on that subject, pro or con, post ’em in the comments.)
This is just a quick, admittedly pedantic post, to help familiarize you with the features of this site. Think of it as a little “user’s manual” for maximizing your enjoyment of ATL:

1. “After the jump” = Click on the little “Continue reading” link at the end of the post excerpt on the main page.

2. You can also read a post in its entirety, or generate a link to it, by clicking on either (a) the title of the post, or (b) the “Permalink” icon (that little paper-clip icon in the lower right-hand corner of each post).

3. You can email a post to a friend or colleague by clicking on the little envelope icon in the corner.

4. The most emailed articles appear in the column on the left-hand side of the page. We monitor this closely because it shows us what you, our readership, find most interesting. Then we can pander to you even more shamelessly.

5. You can append a comment to a post by clicking on the little bubble icon. Cute!

6. At the end of each post, after the words “Posted in:”, you’ll see what are called “Tags.” These are specific subjects discussed at Above the Law. If you click on the Tag in question, you’ll be taken to a page that collects all the posts about that topic. This allows you to see our coverage of a subject over time, or how a story unfolded.

Before we bore experienced readers to tears, here are two more novel things worth checking out:

1. The Forum. It’s in the left-hand column. If there’s not enough to do in the comments section, you can now start your own discussions completely independent of our ten or twelve chunks of commentary, news, and pining after litigatrices like Mary Kay Vyskocil and Rosemary Alito (that’s coming next month).

Registration can be anonymous. Why review that redline of the merger agreement when you can argue over whether HLS Dean Elena Kagan could destroy Columbia Dean David Schizer in a steel cage match? (See here.) Or speculate on who will be the next great “feeder judge” to the Supreme Court? (See here. And yes, we agree with “Mac”: judicial hottie Jeffrey Sutton (6th Cir.) is already funneling his kids to Nino. One this Term, one next Term).

To register for the Forum, click HERE. We reserve the right to indulge our god complexes and delete your posts (or ban users) for any reason whatsoever, including but not limited to: we thought the post was off-topic, the post was promoting Internet Viagra, or we were bored and deleting users is MU-HA-HA… fun. That said, we’re extremely lazy totalitarians and aren’t inclined to delete anything unless extremely provoked. Or bored.

2. The Archives. Also accessible through the left-hand column. If you click on the word “Archive” — no, we don’t think you’re retarded, we’re just really anal — you’ll be taken to the ATL archives, where past posts are collected and organized by topic and by date. We’ve actually been secretly “testblogging” here since July — think of it as our answer to the Katie Couric “shadow show” — so there’s a lot of stuff to check out, even though we only went “live” this week.

That’s enough administrative crap for now. Back to matters of, er, “substance”!

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