Why Possum?
First of all, why not choose a cute* North American marsupial as an avatar, especially if it was your girlfriend’s idea?
Opossums have prehensile tails, and are thus able to hang from trees and see things the other way round. (Actually, the tails of adult opossums are not strong enough to support their weight, but it’s a popular belief, which is all you need for a metaphor to be understood.) My ambition is to see issues of information law the other way round, such as to try and add alternative or complementary viewpoints to ongoing discussions.
However, I by no means claim to be a lateral thinker: this capability, whose importance to legal scholarship many of my teachers at law school have taught me, is very difficult to develop, and it requires a great deal of legal “equilibrium sense” to be meaningful. In fact, I believe that most attempts of lateral thinking will result in clouded—or even completely wrong—arguments. In this spirit, I invite my readers not to play possum, but to see my musings the other way round—and to let me know of it!
