Chez Chesler

I've been on the 'net, in its various forms, since around 1982. That was when I went up to the 12th floor of William James Hall and begged an account on wjh12, then Harvard's gateway machine, and with a voiceline telephone connection in parallel (no doubt using a Sprint account) send a message down and up the East Coast, through Brown, Yale, CUNY, and Columbia, to my brother, sitting at a similar machine in a Princeton Engineering lab. I had limited Usenet at Harvard by 1983, and I think I posted to outside Harvard to the rest of Usenet, back when the net was flat, by 1984. In 1987 I had a work account on tmc!mirror, then the domain for an R&D division of the Times Mirror Company, and in 1989 I had a contract with DEC's Ultrix Engineering Group, leaving me one node off netrix. My brother set up my daughter's web page when she was born in 1995, and soon after that I found that Co-op City, the 55,000-person apartment complex where I grew up had no presence on the web, and I resolved to fix it, with the site that became http://home.comcast.net/~coopcity. More than ten years ago Eugene Volokh published "Lawsuit, Shmawsuit," 103 Yale Law Journal 463 (1993) . Since then I've come across his name from time to time, usually associated with liberties (First or Second Amendment) or Judaica. So naturally when I wanted to see what were current legal theories about just how far a town can go in celebrating religious holidays (the creche on the common) I expected Professor Volokh to have something to say. I'm not sure if he did, but he and other like-minded people had a lot to say, almost all of with which I agreed, on The Volokh Conspiracy and that 'blog became one of my regular reads. And since the etiquette is apparently not to write back to the authors of the 'blog, but to publish one's own, here I am. People send in responses to the Co-op City page, but I have to format them by hand, and I'm usually way behind. This will be more immediate. In any case, I recommend The Volokh Conspiracy.