If someone wants to dredge up old dead threads, that's fine with me. My objection is inflicting them on unsuspecting folks who are trying to stay current without a lot of time on their hands, or are trying to suck threads through a modem on the road and don't want to have their time (and bandwidth) squandered.

I just think it is inconsiderate to do it this way. Link the old thread if you feel you must.

For folks who like the "Golden Oldies" or otherwise don't have anything else to do with their time, they can always click the link.

P.S. I fully agree with you, SPN Lifer, that one of the problems we have "is the unnecessary proliferation of threads" (emphasis added). When there are four or five (or now, here, about ten!) current threads on the same subject, that in my book is "unnecessary". Similarly, when discussing the "value" of an airline mile, it helps to have the prior discussion attached.

However, what about "necessary" proliferation? We don't just keep adding to old threads like the "Who We All Are" series; it gets too bulky to continue to add by accretion, so we break the thread off and start a new one.

Similarly, when a matter has been fully discussed, and closed out months or even years earlier, why bring back the whole thread to reopen the general subject? That's the time for a new thread that is focused on the new specifics.

Why drag in the peripherals when you can link to them? It's tidier that way.

<non-lawyers can quit reading here.>

As a (fellow) lawyer, I'd think you'd appreciate the concept. What would happen if, every time you had a new case in securities law, the judge republished, verbatim, every opinion ever written on the subject as a lead-in to his contribution? That's what citations and footnotes are for. Otherwise your advance sheets would be enormous, the bound volumes would proliferate beyond the available shelf space (as though they don't already), and the difficulty in sifting through the old stuff to find the new thought would be greatly magnified.

Why, even the lower court decisions in that very case aren't reprinted verbatim in the higher court opinions except in very unusual cases (almost always because the lower court opinion wasn't published, and thus cannot be "linked" with a citation).

I adhere to my earlier conclusion: Use links, don't resurrect unless there's a good reason.