There are a number of online places to read about law. Blogs are aplenty, as as student-led online law journals. But I tend to enjoy reading about the law from someone who isn’t a practicing lawyer or law professor because I think its important to see law from a bird’s eye view rather than simply on the ground. If all you do is read things produced by lawyers and law professors every day, your perspective can become warped. The following are three places where you can read pieces touching on the law written by non-lawyers.
The Huffington Post’s Radley Balko does investigative reporting on civil liberties, the criminal justice system, and national security issues. Balko also blogs on The Agitator. His latest piece at HuffPo covered the not so War on Cops.
Mother Jones is one of the best places to find investigative reporting that you can’t find anywhere else. MJ publishes hard hitting pieces on a variety of subjects. For example, in the past few weeks MJ has published a piece on the GOP’s strategy to Voter ID laws to rig win elections and about the War on Drugs.
Lastly, I use the Gallagher Blogs at the University of Washington School of Law to learn about new reports issued by public advocacy groups. The blog is prepared by the librarians at the Gallagher Law Library. In recent weeks, Gallagher Blogs highlighted new justice statistics from the Department of Justice and a new report from the State Department on Human Trafficking.