As we briefly mentioned this past Friday, we here at Abnormal Use were honored last week by being named to the 2011 ABA Journal Blawg 100 for the second year in a row. We couldn’t be more pleased, and we thank you all for your support. We’re very excited about it, so much so that we wanted to take this brief opportunity to share our thoughts.

This project would certainly not have been possible without the support of our firm. We have a handful of different writers, all with different styles and interests, and we think that is at least part of what makes this site successful. Kudos go to our two principal authors Phil Reeves and Stephanie Flynn, as well as our associate contributors: Steve Buckingham, Nick Farr, and Frances Zacher.  We also thank former contributors Laura Simons and Mary Giorgi for their work on the site.  Without that group, there would be no blog here.

As a part of the ABA’s list, we’ve been placed in the Torts category with five other stellar legal blogs, including our friends Walter Olson of Overlawyered, J. Russell Jackson of Jackon on Consumer Class Actions and Mass Torts, and Jim Beck, Will Sachse and Steve McConnell of the Drug and Device Law blog.  That’s great company, adding to the honor.

We were pleased to see some of our other favorite sites make the list in some other categories, as well, including:

Stephanie Kimbro’s Virtual Law Practice blog

Keith Lee’s Associate Mind blog

Rick Hasen’s Election Law Blog

James Daily and Ryan Davidson’s The Law and the Multiverse blog

Kevin Underhill’s Lowering the Bar blog

The Volokh Conspiracy

Jeff Richardson’s iPhone J.D. blog

Eric Goldman’s Technology & Marketing Law Blog

In his own post commenting on his well deserved receipt of the award, Jeff Richardson remarked: “[O]ne of the best parts of this annual list is that it always helps me discover great sites that I had not run across before . . . .”  This is so true. There are always new blogs to be discovered on the list, as well as familiar sites we are long overdue in revisiting.

Finally, a bit of electioneering.

The editors of the ABA Journal have asked that their readers vote upon their favorite blogs in each category.  As noted above, we have been placed in the Torts category with five other excellent blogs. They are all great sites, and we encourage you to read them regularly.  But the editors have asked people to vote, so we must bring that your attention, right?

If you enjoy what we do here at Abnormal Use, we would greatly appreciate your support and humbly request that you cast your vote for us.  Here’s how:

Plug this website into your browser:

http://www.abajournal.com/blawg100

You will be prompted to register with the ABA Journal website.  It’s takes just a moment, as all you need to do is create a username and  password.

Once you have completed the registration, you will be taken to a page with a large logo at the top with twelve categories of blogs listed below it.

Click on the category labeled “Torts.”

Scroll down and find the entry for Abnormal Use.  Click the “Vote Now!” next to the Abnormal Use logo entry.

We’ll let you know how that turns out for us. In the meantime, remember that you can follow Abnormal Use on Twitter here and Facebook here.

We are very honored to note that yesterday we received two prestigious awards in the legal blogsophere. First, we were named by the ABA Journal to this year’s ABA Blawg 100.  We’re very pleased to be included in the Torts category with such blogging greats as Eric Turkewitz of the New York Personal Injury Law Blog, Walter Olson of Overlawyered, Bill Marler of Marler Blog, J. Russell Jackson of Jackson on Consumer Class Actions & Mass Torts, and Jim Beck, Steve McConnell, and Will Sasche of the Drug and Device Law Blog. As you may recall, we were also named to this list last year, and one year later, we couldn’t be happier to be recognized in this fashion once more.  It was a big day yesterday here at AU HQ.

But that’s not all. We also learned today that Abnormal Use has been named one of the Top 25 Torts Blogs by the LexisNexis Litigation Resource Community.  We are in some prestigious company among those nominees, as well, and we’re very pleased and honored to be included as a part of that list, as well. As we said, it was a big day.

We’ll talk a bit more about these honors in this coming Monday’s post, but we wanted to take this opportunity to thank all of you, our dear readers, for your support. We plan to give you all another year of this blogging thing in 2012, and we’re looking forward to doing so. Special thanks must go out to our contributors Steve Buckingham, Nick Farr, and Frances Zacher, as well as alumni Mary Giorgi and Laura Simons. We simply could not do this without them. If you follow the links to both the ABA Journal and Lexis Nexis Litigation Resource Community’s pages, you’ll see that both sites are calling for votes for your favorites of those listed.  We’d very much appreciate it if you would consider us for that additional honor.

Subject change: Apparently, there is a rapper named “Lawyer Mike.”  See here for a video.

Quote of the week: “I’m very disappointed in the fact that somebody riding their bike in February crashes on the ice and gets $100,000. It absolutely reminds me of the case involving the lady who ordered hot coffee at a McDonald’s and spilled it on her lap. That’s pretty much it. You know it’s hot coffee when you order it. And you know riding a bike at night, in winter, is a little dangerous,” John Cornish, the president of the Florence Park District said in this piece by David Erickson of The Missoulian on November 29.

Friend of the blog Walter Olson, the founder of the Overlawyered blog and a senior fellow at The Cato Institute, will be speaking right here in Greenville, South Carolina next week.

Walter will be giving a speech entitled “Law Schools and an Overlawyered America,” based in part on his new book, Schools for Misrule: Legal Academia and an Overlawyered America (Encounter Books, 2011). Prior to joining the Cato Institute, Walter was a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and he has been a columnist for Great Britain’s Times Online as well as Reason. His writing appears regularly in such publications as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and The New York Post.

Here are the specifics:

When: Wednesday, December 7, 2011, 12:00 p.m. to 1:00 p.m.

Location: Womble Carlyle Sandridge & Rice, PLLC, 550 South Main St, Suite 400, Greenville, SC 29601

Sponsored by the Greenville chapter of The Federalist Society, the event has been approved for 1.0 hour of CLE credit in South Carolina.  Admission is free for the event.