Birth Announcement: Persuasive Authorities

We are thrilled to announce the birth of our blog, Persuasive Authorities, born on this day, August 31, 2009, at 9:01am EST. Proud parents each of us, we are located around the world, stationed in different countries, engaged in our labor of love—the law, whether as teachers, scholars, fellows and researchers, all of us collectively having lived and worked on all continents (except Antarctica!)—and each bound to the other by our shared aspiration to become, yes, as the name of our first-born blog would suggest, binding authorities, and no longer merely persuasive ones.

We will nurture Persuasive Authorities with our reflections on law, politics, foreign policy, Michael Scott, the New York Yankees, Thomas Carlyle's Great Man Theory, Real Madrid, the Atari Mindlink, the Great One, Bollywood, Māori society, God in the Canadian Constitution, Niklas Luhmann, Herbert Spencer's Theory of Social Statics, Big Brother 11, state-centric sovereignty, the coming water crisis, Beyonce, whether the president should be more Machiavellian, the Edmonton Protocol, the China Securities Regulatory Commission, Dungeons & Dragons, the daily weather. And everything in between.

But mostly just law.

We have assembled a group of founding bloggers possessing diverse interests across all fields of law, hoping to cultivate a friendly forum for interdisciplinary, comparative, and transnational debate—respectful yet rigorous debate.

We invite you to join us, and to make this forum your own.

Welcome.