How Appealing still appeals
In 2002, a colleague at his Philadelphia law firm encouraged Howard Bashman 89L to check out a new legal blog called The Volokh Conspiracy, a platform for law professors around the country to weigh in on American jurisprudence.
“It sounded pretty frivolous,” Bashman reflects 15 years later. “Why should I be interested in law professors spouting off about legal issues? Eventually, after several tries, I did take a look at the site, and it turned out to be very interesting. And it still is today.”
The eponymous blog, for founder and UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh (whose brother and fellow contributor, Alexander “Sasha” Volokh, is an Emory Law associate professor), signaled Bashman’s own foray into the blogosphere. A career appellate attorney who runs a boutique firm in Willow Grove, Pennsylvania, Bashman set out to create an online presence devoted entirely to news accounts of state and federal appellate court rulings.
Now in its 16th year and created only months after Volokh’s blog, How Appealing has evolved into a must-read in the legal world, drawing as many as 10,000 visitors per day. It is largely an aggregator for online accounts of appellate law decisions, but on a monthly basis, Bashman, who formerly wrote a column for The Legal Intelligencer in Philadelphia, publishes his own legal musings. “There are times when I stake out a position,” he says modestly.
Nobody was more amazed than Bashman at the immediate success of the blog. “Thankfully, early on, other websites began linking to it, and journalists who covered legal issues began writing about it,” he says. “I was amazed in the beginning how there was a really strong readership in courts and in universities and law schools. People were contacting me through email to make sure that things weren’t evading my attention.”
Eugene Volokh commended his protégé in a letter to the Washington Post in May, calling How Appealing “one of the few blogs I read each day - an invaluable source of breaking news.”
Sasha Volokh is also a fan. “I’m not aware of any other source out there that keeps tabs on the most interesting appellate opinions from all the circuits,” he says.
Sasha says the blog is particularly beneficial to students on law reviews, “who need to figure out viable topics for their student comments. If a topic is the subject of frequent appellate litigation, it’s probably a good topic to write a comment about.”
Bashman spends a few hours each day collecting news stories to post on the blog. He’ll often do so on his lunch break, when he returns home to watch a show - of late The Walking Dead and The Amazing Race - with his wife, Janice. “I’ll be blogging at the same time, and she’ll say, ‘If you were watching the show more carefully, you wouldn’t have to ask me what happened,’” he laughs.
As newspapers have closed or shrunk their coverage in a constricting industry, Bashman has created a one-stop shop for court watchers. “I’m as saddened by anyone when newspapers go out of business and stop covering the courts, but there are other things that have cropped up in their place, online sources that I’ll link to often,” he says.
Eleven of the 13 federal appellate courts post audio of oral arguments, whose links Bashman posts to the blog. He’s occasionally given to puckishness, as was the case in penning a headline for a Sixth Circuit Federal Appellate Court decision in Cincinnati. The court upheld in 2006 that a library in Columbus, Ohio, could require patrons to wear shoes. Bashman’s offering? “No shirt, no shoes, no literature.”
New York Timesreporter Adam Liptak, a former lawyer who covers the Supreme Court, wrote to Bashman expressing his gratitude for the blog. Liptak commented that he was “lost” upon joining the newspaper in 2002.
“I had no sources, few ideas, and no way to feel confident I was not missing important legal developments around the country,” Liptak wrote in a letter posted on the blog. “A month later, like magic, How Appealing materialized. It immediately became, and has remained for me and countless other legal reporters, an indispensable resource: comprehensive, reliable, nonpartisan, enthusiastic, and good natured.”
In his pursuit of justice - and blog effectiveness - Bashman abides by a guiding credo. “To the extent that I have a motto, it’s more or less: Don’t make people think less of you than they would have thought of you before the existence of the website,” he says.
Visit Bashman’s blog at howappealing.abovethelaw.com.
