Lawfare is Three: A Birthday Message

Three years ago today, Jack, Bobby and I launched Lawfare. On its launch, it had no staff, three writers, and a grand total of nine visits. I think it's safe to say that while all three of us expected this particular child to flourish in some sense, none of us remotely anticipated what it has become. Lawfare is now, at three years old, the sort of unruly toddler that is at once a great source of pride and impossible for a parent to keep up with. It has an editorial staff. It has regular and occasional contributors who range from law students to senior scholars and practitioners. It has a podcast and a book review. And it has a readership that is, quite simply, unique. According to Google Analytics, Lawfare has received more than two million visits from nearly a million unique visitors---94,000 visits in August alone. As I write these words, there are more than 70 people reading the site in 20 countries. The numbers alone, however, do not tell the whole story. More interesting still is who Lawfare's readers are. Google helpfully makes available data on the information systems that route traffic to one's site---which are mostly major commercial service providers. In Lawfare's case, however, the top  information systems also include those of the Department of Justice (#4), Department of Defense (#5), the CIA (#17), the Senate (#18) and House of Representatives (#28), the State Department (#19), and the Executive Office of the President (#46). The site is used every day as a news source, a magazine, and a research tool by those who have to make "hard national security choices" for a living, by those who dissent from those decisions, by those who write about them, and by those who cover these struggles in the press. We are all deeply grateful to everyone who takes the time to read the site, to engage with its authors, and to send us material. Our goal, simply put, is to be useful to this community. We have big things planned for the coming year, and I thought I would use the occasion of Lawfare's third birthday to mention some of them. As I noted the other day, we are going into the scholarship business---publishing timely scholarly works of use to practitioners and policymakers. Some readers may have noted that we have, of late, been sharing certain content with our friends over at the New Republic (for example, this piece yesterday by Matt).  This is actually the thin edge of what I hope will be a very significant wedge. In October, we'll be doing a pilot partnership with the TNR folks---about which I will have a great deal more to say in the coming weeks---which will bring Lawfare writers to TNR readers on a regular basis. Now that our site is off of Bluehost, we also will be doing some technical and design upgrades to it. And we continue to develop the Lawfare Wiki Document Library, which already features a number of resources you can access from our sidebar. The goal is to continue Lawfare's evolution from the small blog by three friends into a multimedia information platform that serves the national security legal community at all levels of its engagement with its subject matter. I would be remiss if I failed to mention that running this site costs money. Our deep thanks to everyone who stepped up to support Lawfare financially in response to our recent technical troubles. The Brookings Institution remains the sort of dreamy partner for a project like this for which a small non-profit web site can only, well, dream. But Lawfare readers have a role in supporting the site too. So if you use and value this service, please consider clicking on the "Donate" button on our sidebar. And keep using our Amazon widget to buy textbooks and anything else. Like any other toddler, Lawfare is not cheap.