New Comment Policy

At the beginning of OT06, we instituted our current comment policy, whereby commenters will not be approved unless they leave their full names. We did that to prevent what we saw as unproductive sniping by a tiny minority of our readers that took away from the overall quality of the blog. After a year and a half of that policy, that sort of silly sniping has not abated despite the change.

As such, beginning immediately, we are going to formally disable the comments feature on most of our posts, although we may enable comments on a case-by-case (or post-by-post) basis, particularly for posts that may prompt substantive questions about Supreme Court history, procedure, and practice. And although the default scenario for most posts will be that no comments will be permitted, we may at our discretion append any particularly interesting comments (which you can send to us at scotusblog.feedback@gmail.com) to the post themselves.

If you prefer to leave comments directly and debate with other readers, other blogs that cover some of the same topics that we do and that allow commenting include The Volokh Conspiracy, Balkinization, The Wall Street Journal Law Blog, and Above The Law. Additionally, the “Digg This Post!” feature under each entry allows you to submit an entry to Digg, where those who are registered with that service can comment on our posts via the reproductions of them that appear on Digg.

We understand that a small group of our readers who frequently use the comments feature will be disappointed by this development, and we hope that those people will still continue to read us and rely on us for their news and commentary on all things Supreme Court. For everyone else, we hope that eliminating such unproductive commentary only enhances the site.