Above the Law (“ATL”) is almost eleven years old, and it was once well known for its rough-and-tumble comments section. This anonymous forum gave readers the chance to submit substantive, thoughtful, and humorous responses on the legal news of the day, sometimes even providing our editors with useful information that could be incorporated into stories as they continued to develop and unfold.
Unfortunately, the comments section had a dark side. Some found them to be too edgy and too offensive, but they were still of great value to us, so that’s why we tweaked our layout to hide them in January 2009. Things continued to devolve drastically from there. In the past, single stories on Above the Law would garner hundreds of comments, but as time wore on, the comments became fewer in number and more abusive than ever before.
As one of the final holdouts on the ATL comments, I was able to witness their degradation from my time as a reader through my time as an editor. I started working part-time for ATL in 2010, and became an editor in 2011. My phone number and address were posted numerous times in the comments over the years, and that wasn’t an issue for me. My intelligence and appearance were criticized on an almost daily basis in the comments, and that wasn’t an issue for me. My husband’s name, law firm, and office phone number were posted several times, and that wasn’t an issue for me. It wasn’t until someone threatened to brutally and violently rape me that I began to seriously question the value of our comments section. The comments were no longer a laughing matter to me.
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In April 2016, we decided that it would be best to fully eliminate the comments section, as many other websites had done before us. It was a significant change, but it was one that had to be made. We work very hard to generate content that we’d like to be taken seriously — and we believed then and still believe now that redirecting discussion of our content away from anonymous comments and toward social media was an important step in this direction.
Above the Law hasn’t had comments for more than one year now — and we have no regrets about that change in policy.
We still welcome contributions from readers, be they compliments, complaints, or corrections. Contact information for authors appears at the end of every article. If you have anything you’d like to share with that writer, we encourage you to reach out to the author directly. As always, you can contact all the ATL editors by email or by text message (646-820-8477). To that end, to make things a little easier for our readers, here are each of our email addresses. Click here to email David Lat. Click here to email Elie Mystal. Click here to email Staci Zaretsky. Click here to email Joe Patrice. Click here to email Kathryn Rubino.
We also welcome your engagement with our content on social media. Follow us on Twitter, “like” us on Facebook, and join our group on LinkedIn. Please take our stories and share them on your social-media platform of choice and add your own commentary. We love it when our stories inspire a lively discussion on someone’s Facebook wall or on Twitter, and we find that these exchanges tend to be civil and substantive. Be the change you want to see in internet commenting.
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We look forward to bringing readers the latest developments in news about the world of law — including law schools, law firms, and the legal profession more broadly — and we sincerely hope you’ll join us as we continue to publish serious legal journalism as no other website can do, and as Above the Law has done for more than a decade. Thank you.
Staci Zaretsky has been an editor at Above the Law since 2011. She’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments. You can follow her on Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn.