When I started this blog in 2014, there weren’t any blogs quite like it. There still aren’t. Someone should start another!

When I was scheming about launching a Third Circuit blog, I was inspired by Tom Goldstein‘s Scotusblog. (The name at the top of the page, CA3blog, is a deliberate nod to Scotusblog.) I was inspired by Scotusblog in a few distinct ways:

• Scotusblog is mind-bendingly good. It helped challenge me to try to make something that super-smart readers (you!) actually wanted to read.
• I believe Scotusblog (along with Goldstein’s own practice) helped usher in the current era of Supreme Court specialists, and I hoped my blog could help do the same at the circuit level. Federal appellate specialists can do better work, and, well, the prevailing level of practice in the circuit courts has plenty of room to improve.
• Scotusblog didn’t seem to hurt Goldstein’s career trajectory any, and selfishly I figured a blog might do me some good, too. I was a more-or-less unknown young lawyer, starting a solo practice far from where I went to law school and farther still from the circuit where I’d clerked. Yet here I was, dreaming of building something that no one else was delusional enough to try, a circuit-specialist solo practice. I hoped the blog would inch my delusion closer to reality.

I know I’m not the only one who has goals like that. And while it’s not for me to say whether I’ve made an inch of headway towards any those lofty aims, a few concrete signs of progress already: a cite in a Third Circuit opinion, quotes in the New York Times and Washington Post, and steady readership growth.

So, here’s hoping this blog will help to inspire someone out there to start something similar in another circuit. (Or here! Plenty of room!)