Legal news views wanted Commentary
Legal news views wanted
Edited by: Bernard Hibbitts | JURIST Staff

Welcome to JURIST's Hotline, where you can publish your insights on legal news as it happens.

We've designed this service to do two things:

  1. to give lawyers, law professors, policy experts, and people caught up in legal events a platform where they can quickly and easily share legal news views with others without having to maintain their own weblogs or websites;
  2. to provide JURIST's readers with expert legal commentary that might complement and even match the pace of our continuous Paper Chase legal news coverage

Scholars who have their own blogs are welcome here too. We hope that Hotline can help those of you already blogging to bring some of your original perspectives on legal news to the attention of a new audience.

If you have comments on a legal news development, just e-mail JURIST@law.pitt.edu for passwords to this blog and you'll be online in minutes. You can say your piece and be on your way. Frame your remarks so that they can stand alone as independent contributions that can be easily understood and referenced later.

The idea here is succinct analysis rather than continuous discussion – two or three off-the-cuff paragraphs, perhaps, that summarize your thinking or reaction for busy professionals. If some readers (or other contributors) want to discuss what you say, they can leave comments on your post, and of course you're welcome to comment on those comments or on other posts (by leaving comments on those) at any time. Otherwise we hope you'll keep your passwords and sign in again next time you have a few minutes and a perspective you'd like to share.

Publishing your insights on legal news on JURIST is a simple and efficient way to enhance the visibility of your ideas and your law school while contributing to public discourse and education. Tie the latest legal news development into an article or book you're writing or have just published (and cite it!). Pen a couple of paragraphs as a trial balloon for a talk, paper or a more formal op-ed down the line. Or use a local event, lecture or speech to lead into an analysis of a current issue making legal headlines. Be relevant, but be creative.

And don't be shy. This is an open forum and a big tent – entire law school faculties can come in to show their stuff. If the University of Chicago law faculty by itself can power an excellent blog, consider what we might do together.

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And now it's all yours. E-mail JURIST for passwords and have your say on the latest legal news now.

Opinions expressed in JURIST Commentary are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of JURIST's editors, staff, donors or the University of Pittsburgh.
THIS DAY @ LAW

Thomas Becket, former Chancellor of England, murdered by Henry II's knights

On December 29, 1170, Archbishop Thomas Becket, former Chancellor of England, was murdered in Canterbury Cathedral by knights acting in the name of Henry II.

Becket and Henry had been entangled in a power struggle over, among other things, criminal jurisdiction over clergy. Read a contemporary account of the murder of Thomas Becket.

Texas attains US statehood

On December 29, 1845, Texas became the twenty-eighth state to join the United States of America when US President James K. Polk signed the Ordinance of Annexation. Texas had a complicated path to statehood because it had formerly been part of Mexico and then an independent republic. The US Congress passed the Annexation of the Republic of Texas Joint Resolution on March 1, 1845. Voters in Texas then approved the Ordinance of Annexation in October, before it was approved by the US Congress and signed into law by President Polk on this day in 1845. The US Supreme Court later ruled in Texas v. White that, despite its unique path to statehood, Texas did not have the right to secede from the union.