Last call

It's a dark day in the once-bright blogosphere. One of the grand-daddies of all blogs, TaxProf Blog, is disappearing, effective today. By the time you read this, it may already be gone. 

The guy behind the blog, a tax law professor named Paul Caron, has pulled the plug on his pet project after 21 years of tireless daily coverage of tax law, legal education, higher education, and several other topics dear to his heart. He's put up more than 55,000 posts. That's something like seven or eight posts a day. Every. Single. Day. 

And there's more to it than meets the eye, especially when you're monitoring comments in order to keep things civil, rounding up advertisers, tiptoeing around copyright issues, and doing all sorts of behind-the-scenes things to keep up the quality. Caron's done all that and more.

He started TaxProf Blog shortly after I launched my original effort, but while I have taken several extended breaks from the blogging grind just to regain my sanity, Caron has never stopped. And in the meantime, get this, he moved from his first law professorship at the University of Cincinnati to a tenured slot on the Pepperdine University law faculty, and then they made him Pepperdine dean! He's been the dean there for eight years and change, all the while keeping up one of the most ambitious websites there ever was or ever will be. It's the stuff of legend.

Oh, and did I mention? His university nearly burned down in a wildfire during his current tenure as dean. He was in charge of holding all things law school together throughout that terrible ordeal.

Given his remarkable energy and tenacity, why give up blogging now? Well, for one thing, Caron's at retirement age. But what forced his hand was that TaxProf Blog is on the Typepad blogging platform, and that platform is going dark, for all of its writers, any minute now. Yes, he could re-restablish TaxProf Blog on another system, like Google's Blogger (which is where this blog resides), but I can tell you from experience, the hassle of the transition would be enormous, and he knows it.

Caron has always been gracious to me, charitable in reviewing my professional work, and offering nothing but nice things to say about my hobby, currently on your screen. Although I've met him in person only once or twice, and we're different in a lot of ways—for example, no one has ever mistaken me for dean material—I feel a kinship with him. And so, like so many of his readers, I'm sad to see his blog shut down.

To say that his Herculean efforts will be missed is beyond an understatement. If there's ever a Hall of Fame for bloggers, Caron will not be in it. No, his name will be over the front door and there'll be a statute of the guy outside.