Due to the unilateral decision by Google's Blooger to discontinue FTP blog publication for all Blogger users, it is no longer possible to host a Blogger-powered blog on one's own domain, in our case here at lawpundit.com, to which we have always posted via FTP, which was Blogger's ORIGINAL format when Blogger was owned by Pyra Labs -- prior to the acquisition of the company by Google in 2003. As we have written at The Life of the Law:

"As background it is useful to know that the oldest users of the blog service Blogger, founded in 1999, are among the oldest and most experienced bloggers on the Internet, who originally used Blogger after it was created by and owned by Pyra Labs. The co-founder of Pyra Labs was none other than Evan Williams – who coined the term “blogger”. In 2003, Blogger was sold to Google. Williams left Google in 2004, later to found and head a company we all know today as Twitter. Blogger was never the same after the departure of Williams, so that Blogger – in our judgment – was designed thereafter for Google’s own purposes, not for the wishes of the users."

Users such as myself stuck with Google over the years in spite of our reservations because there were really not that many blogging options available in the early days of blogging. Nevertheless, the writing was on the wall. Google’s Blogger was not there for its users – WE were there for Google. So now a Blogger blog must forthwith be hosted on Google's servers either at blogspot.com or at a custom domain at Google, which then redirects to a proprietary domain -- but is still hosted at Google.

This custom domain option is only possible of implementation if the blog is hosted at a subdomain, whereas the blog LawPundit has been hosted directly at our proprietary lawpundit.com domain at the page you are now viewing. There is no way to host the blog at lawpundit.com and to retain this page -- lawpundit.htm -- as the main blog address via a custom domain.

Hence, we have had to opt for a move of the LawPundit blog to our mirror blog at
lawpundit.blogspot.com, which has some advantages -- it is free.

At the same time, there are all kinds of disadvantages with that move since we are then paying for a proprietary domain at lawpundit.com -- from which we initially redirected this page, a page which effectively has no use to us - at least, not in its original form.

Moreover, our Google Page Rank at the time of the forced blog move was 6, which is pretty high, and it is a ranking which we earned in the course of nearly seven years of steady blogging and over 1500 postings. Nevertheless, although the Page Rank for the blog was 6, the page rank for the lawpundit.com domain as a whole was only 4, since we seldom used the main index page, but it is this domain rank that we apparently have "inherited" at blogpost.com, where we see a 4 rather than a 6.

Whether that is of any importance in the course of world affairs is doubtful, but it is regrettable to lose page ranking due to arbitrary unilateral decisions made contra to user wishes at Blogger.

For the time being, therefore, this page will be retained in its present form -- perhaps with occasional amendments -- but will not be updated regularly. Updates to the LawPundit blog are found forthwith at lawpundit.blogspot.com.

To protect ourselves against further arbitrary actions at Blogger, we have also started a new blog concentrating on law from an interdisciplinary point of view at WordPress titled The Life of the Law.



The blog The Life of the Law is about all things law and, like LawPundit, is written by author and educator Andis Kaulins, J.D. Stanford University, Former FFA Law Lecturer, University of Trier, co-author of the Langenscheidt/Routledge German-English, English-German Dictionary of Business, Commerce and Finance, alumnus associate of Paul, Weiss et al. in New York City. The Life of the Law takes its name from a famous paragraph at the outset of a book on the common law by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. which reads:

The object of this book is to present a general view of the Common Law. To accomplish the task, other tools are needed besides logic. It is something to show that the consistency of a system requires a particular result, but it is not all. The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience. The felt necessities of the time, the prevalent moral and political theories, intuitions of public policy, avowed or unconscious, even the prejudices which judges share with their fellow-men, have had a good deal more to do than the syllogism in determining the rules by which men should be governed. The law embodies the story of a nation's development through many centuries, and it cannot be dealt with as if it contained only the axioms and corollaries of a book of mathematics. In order to know what it is, we must know what it has been, and what it tends to become. We must alternately consult history and existing theories of legislation. But the most difficult labor will be to understand the combination of the two into new products at every stage. The substance of the law at any given time pretty nearly corresponds, so far as it goes, with what is then understood to be convenient; but its form and machinery, and the degree to which it is able to work out desired results, depend very much upon its past. - THE COMMON LAW, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., p. 1 (1881) [emphasis added]

However, building up a new readership for such a blog is a chore and we do not expect to make any great strides there in the short term. When LawPundit started, there were few blawgs online and readers were attracted to the pioneers. Now there are literally millions of blogs on the Internet and starting a new blog from scratch is a formidable public relations challenge, for which we currently really do not have the time or inclination. We will have to see how it develops.

About our authored publications:

The Langenscheidt/Routledge German-English, English-German
Dictionary of Business, Commerce and Finance,



Together with a team of presently two other authors, including chief editor Ludwig Merz, we co-author the world's leading Langenscheidt/Routledge German-English, English-German Dictionary of Business, Commerce and Finance, currently in its 3rd edition.

Among other things, I am responsible there inter alia for law, patents, information technology and the Internet, including new media and telecommunications, all of course primarily from a legislative and regulatory point of view - with a special focus on the European Union.