Legal Commentary

My Comment Policy

By David Bernstein

For a while I was leaving comments open on almost every post, but for the last week or so I?ve been mostly closing them. I thought it was therefore a good time to reiterate my comments policy:

Comments are a blessing and a burden. The burden is that we have moderated comments on this blog, moderation takes time and effort, and there is no way with our current setup to effectively ban any given abusive commenter, so one is left to manually delete his comments one by one. 

So I?ve decided to open comments when I feel like opening comments. This will depend on (a) how interested I am in seeing the comments; (b) how productive I think the discussion will be; (c) how likely I think the particular topic will be to attract cranks who need to be moderated; and (d) how pressed for time I am. I also may open comments for a time, and then close them if I either get too busy to moderate, or the comments have devolved into crankdom.

Full post as published by The Volokh Conspiracy on May 01, 2010 (boomark / email).