How Smart Is Blonde Justice?

Blonde Justice is a legal blog run by a public defender who prefers to remain anonymous and thus styles herself after the Elle Woods character played by Reese Witherspoon in Legally Blonde and Legally Blonde 2.

I worry about people who run anonymous blogs. Not that I distrust their motives or anything like that. I just worry because so many of them aren’t very good at keeping it anonymous. Slowly, bit by bit, they give themselves away: Little bits of description about their city, references to events reported in the local news, their age or occupation.

Anonymous legal bloggers are especially vulnerable. If a blogger reveals that he’s a 38-year old defense lawyer in a small two-partner firm in Cleveland, it only takes an hour or so of browsing on-line attorney biographies to figure out who the author is. I’ve figured out a couple of them just out of monkey curiosity. If I knew more about the legal system, I could probably figure out a few more.

I’d also have to be more motivated. Other people are a lot more motivated than I am, and several famous bloggers have been unmasked, such as Washington sex kitten Jessica Cutler, who blogged as Washingtonienne. (Of course, when you’re a Senate staffer sleeping with other Senate staffers for money, a lot of people are gonna come looking for you.) More recently, South Knox Bubba unmasked himself before someone else could do it.

It takes a smart person to stay anonymous for a long time.

So how smart is Blonde Justice? Check out her answer to one of those annoying question lists that keep going around:

Four Places You’ve Been on Vacation

You know, no one really knows where the Simpsons live. Yes, Springfield, but in what state? I’ve always thought I’d figure it out by where they go on vacation. A family isn’t going to say “Yippee! We’re going to ____!” and name the state where they live. By process of elimination then, someday we should know where they live. Therefore, I had to geographically anonymized this section. Sorry.

On a sailboat
On a cruise ship
Tropical Islands
Central America

Blonde Justice is that smart. And that paranoid. I gotta admire that.