It seems that everywhere I go out to eat now-- from a charming Fairfield bistro to the lamentable pizza joint next to the law school-- my food arrives at the table with a spring of rosemary sticking out of it like a conquerer's penant. Now I like rosemary as much as the next guy, in fact I probably like the stuff a great deal more than the next guy, but it's not as if the food in question actually tastes like rosemary.

I like classy presentation, but I believe in truth in garnishing.

Last month, when Nicole Garnett and Tom Merrill came to Yale Law School to debate eminent-domain-reform-legislation, I liveblogged their discussion. Merrill described the two different ways of thinking about eminent domain-- as a utilitarian problem of holdouts and as an individual rights problem. While he suggested that he was not willing to quarrel with the individual-rights view, he was still skeptical about imposing subject-matter limitations on the use of eminent domain.

Ben Barros reports from the GELPI conference that Merrill's skepticism appears to have given way. Barros reports that "(Merrill) said he would agree with a ban on eminent domain where the sole purpose is to raise tax revenue, and would agree to a ban on the economic development takings of homes."

Good!

Ethan Leib explores the ethics of editing blog posts once they're up. He correctly deduces that there is something ethically problematic about editing only if one has a duty to one's readers or to the blogosphere generally to preserve one's words in perpetuity. There is no such duty.

However, the question of ethics does not resolve the question of etiquette. There is, in much of the political and legal blogosphere, a norm against casual deletion of substance. It is generally considered quite unremarkable to eliminate spelling and typographical errors, and only mildly problematic to rephrase clunky sentences.

Eliminating substantive posts, however-- except in exceptional circumstances-- is generally frowned upon. (NOTE: I happen to think that Leib's deletions are sufficiently infrequent not to violate this rough etiquette rule.)

Why have such a norm? There are plenty of systemic reasons:

1: Not knowing whether a post is going to stay there decreases the incentive to respond to it on one's own blog because there's no guarantee that the link will still work a few days later. If one's own post depends on the content of the link, then respondents risk wasting time and energy.

2: Part of the value of blogs is that they allow an author to build up a reputation and a record. Among other things this means that newcomers to your blog can page backwards and see where you stood on the issues of the day as they unfolded. There are limits to this-- I wrote things when this blog started in 2002-03 that I am embarrassed by now, but there is too much to even dream of cleaning it all up.

3: If blog posts are ephemeral, then meticulous or persnickety readers are encourage to archive the pages every time they view them, in case what is here today is gone tomorrow. This is a waste of time-- the least-cost-avoider of deletion is the blogger.

Of course, none of these factors is universally accepted or of such overwhelming importance as to dominate all exceptions. But they do, I think, rightly contribute to a general norm that one usually ought to just leave one's thoughts on the record, appending, updating, and retracting as need be. Occasionally one does otherwise, and if it is sufficiently rare, there is no harm done.

UPDATE: I should add that timing matters, on both ends. I regularly edit posts immediately after posting them because I find the preview function in my edition of Movable Type to be next to useless, and only the truly obsessive even notice. On the other hand once a post is sufficiently old that nobody cares anymore, people have less of an expectation that it will hang around in perpetuity, especially if the blogger may someday tire of paying for his space.