Adjudicating Europe

In a recent post in Opinio Juris, Duncan Hollis has given AdjudicatingEurope a nice welcome to the blogsphere (many thanks!).

However, he has interpreted (and many might have too) that we, in our Opening Post, are implying that there is no EU Law blogsphere out there.

I can not speak in the name of all the Editors of AdjudicatingEurope, but, for my part, there is a point I consider important to clear from the very beginning: AdjudicatingEurope is not intending to be the first, or the best of (among other) EU Law Blogs. Quite the contrary! When the Opening Post states that Europe “has not yet developed a comparable blogsphere of its own”, all it was meant to say is that we, in Europe, lack the incredible blogging community that has taken shape in the US during the past years.

In Europe we have had (and still have) great blogs: EU Law Blog is terrific. So many of us follow it and learn from it. The ECJ Blog is not as lively as it was at its start, but it is a resourceful place to follow the Court’s case-law. The ECHR Blog is an amazing companion to the Strasbourg Court of Human Rights. Europablog is also superb and it has a Law in Context approach that many miss in other blogs.

I am forgetting other blogs, of course. However, the point in the Opening Post was intending to say that these blogs have developed in a very non-participative way. Readers do not usually make comments. Guest bloggers are rare. The comments of these blogs hardly condition or influence the academic or judicial debate.

For these and other reasons, blogging in Europe is so very different to blogging in the US! That is what the Opening Post is pointing at, and I certainly hope that none of our predecessors in the European blogging community take it otherwise.

-Pescatorius.