Legal News

Portolio drinks the law Kool-Aid

Posted on August 06, 2008
When Conde Nast launched Portfolio magazine in early 2007, I fretted that it didn't have the kind of legal reporting in it that Fortune excels at, and that Forbes and Business Week (headed by former American Lawyer editor Steve Adler) also emphasize from time to time...

Behind the scenes of "Homicide 37"

Posted on August 05, 2008
Brendan McCarthy, the New Orleans Times-Picayune cops reporter who wrote the "Homicide 37" series that I raved about, gives some peeks behind the scenes of the project in this Q&A with CJR's Katia Bachko. On the second day of shadowing a pair of detectives -- in a deal he struck with New Orleans P...

Ruling supports openness in jury selection

Posted on August 04, 2008
A panel of the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has written a lengthy opinion explaining why a trial judge erred in trying to hide the names of jurors in a government-corruption trial. The decision is reported in this detailed story by Shannon Duffy of The Legal Intelligencer in Philadelphia...

Amerithrax backlash: cooler heads prevail?

Posted on August 04, 2008
The more that reporters dig into the Bruce Ivins anthrax case, the less certain we are of key facts asserted in the first- and second-day reports. David Willman of the LA Times led his big scoop last Friday with the news that Ivins killed himself "just as the Justice Department was about to file criminal charges against him for the attacks...

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"Homicide 37" series: bleak and powerful

Posted on August 03, 2008
Despite a frustrating Web presentation that obscures the project's ambitions, this New Orleans Times-Picayune series by Brendan McCarthy -- touted in E&P as a refreshing contrast with the Washington Post's recent "Who Killed Chandra Levy?" serial (which is unfair to the Post's excellent series) -- is pure urban despair...

Another take on the mortgage mess

Posted on August 03, 2008
While the backlash from the housing-bubble burst has focused on Wall Street finances, the Miami Herald's "Borrowers Betrayed" investigation shows that the problems also involve crimes of a lower sort. In a series eight months in the making and a marvel of high-volume record-crunching, the Herald's Jack Dolan, Rob Barry (yes, Dave Barry's son), and Matthew Haggman pack a punch by showing how badly regulated Florida's mortgage business is...

Amerithrax, Day Two: Revenge of the followups

Posted on August 02, 2008
We know who won the anthrax-scoop contest on Day One. What about the all-important Day Two, when the major papers scrambled to fill in as many blanks as possible? My comparison of the LA Times, NY Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today stacks up like so:Best new twist: LAT's David Willman, who plays the scoop artist game expertly, having held back a fresh angle (on suspect Bruce Ivins' patents and stake in anthrax vaccine discoveries) while teasing his competitors with a mention deep in his story that he had been onto Ivins "earlier this year...

Court records yield rich spy story

Posted on August 01, 2008
For the second time this year, Mother Jones' venerable James Ridgeway -- this time with an assist by the magazine's DC bureau chief, David Corn, and associate editor Daniel Schulman -- has mined a cache of records and depositions from a lawsuit over a business investment to dish dirt about opposition research...

LAT anthrax scoop chock full of detail

Posted on August 01, 2008
The LA Times' David Willman scoops the competition about the apparent suicide of a suspect in the 2001 anthrax attacks. Anonymously and occasionally vaguely sourced -- except for direct quotes from the suspect's sworn statement to investigators -- Willman's story is packed with detail about an investigation that has now burst into the open with the death Tuesday of the suspect, Bruce Ivins, who worked at the government's biodefense research laboratories at Ft...

Oliphant cranks up the legal-reporting/blogging heat

Posted on July 31, 2008
Chicago Tribune's law and Supreme Court reporter Jim Oliphant is blogging on his own now, rather than just at the Trib's Swamp blog. The blog is called Writ Large (cute). Prolific and playful (check out his introductory post Infrequently Asked Questions), Oliphant is worth keeping an eye (or an RSS feed) on...

Goldsmith vs. Lichtblau: It's payback time

Posted on July 31, 2008
In his book last year, The Terror Presidency: Law and Judgment Inside the Bush Administration, former Justice Department official Jack Goldsmith recounts a "friendly" introductory chat over coffee he had with The New York Times' Eric Lichtblau. The meeting, requested by Lichtblau, ends with Goldsmith lying to Lichtblau to avoid spilling national security secrets that the reporter asked about -- and then his anger over being subpoenaed to testify in the Justice Department's leak investigation over the Lichtblau-Risen stories...

Why not inject legal facts into Scrabulous debate?

Posted on July 30, 2008
This Heather Timmons story in today's Times is about outrage across the Internet, and among Facebook users in particular, over the demise of the game Scrabulous in the face of Hasbro's copyright infringement claims. So would it have killed Timmons and her editors to spend a graf or two explaining what exactly are Hasbro's claims, and whether experts think it's a slam-dunk case? What features of a game can be protected? What are the usual remedies? Does the name Scrabulous itself pose a trademark problem, or is this really all about copyright, as the story seems to imply? Those of us who haven't read the pleadings and scouted out more in-depth treatment of the case -- and who aren't already IP-law aficionados -- are left in the dark...

Mauro's tickler file comes through

Posted on July 30, 2008
Bravo to Tony Mauro for returning one year later to the story of Chief Justice John Roberts' health. Even though his questions go unanswered, Mauro calmly makes the case why it's still news in this post at BLT.His report also makes me regret the snarky tone I took last year about coverage of the chief's blackout and seizure...

Johnston vs. GE: hardball PR plays out in pleadings

Posted on July 30, 2008
Leave it to David Cay Johnston to turn a tax-law story into a threat-laden tale of hardball corporate PR. The dogged and feisty former New York Times reporter is the talk of the tax-law blogs, and has set General Electric lawyers' hair on fire, with his June 30 report in Tax Analysts' weekly Tax Notes International on allegations of improprieties involving a GE subsidiary in Brazil...

Glimpses of Hamdan trial news coverage

Posted on July 29, 2008
Two recent stories from the trial of Guantánamo detainee Salim Hamdan combine to provide a snapshot of the logistics involved in providing coverage of the trial. Yesterday, Miami Herald's Carol Rosenberg noted that the majority of reporters who flew in for the start of the trial flew right back out after only two days...

Playing catch-up with legal-reporting news

Posted on July 28, 2008
A few brief updates on previously blogged stories that advanced while I was away:The New York Sun's Josh Gerstein travels to California to cover the hearing that he wrote about earlier involving a leak investigation and Washington Times reporter William Gertz (here's my earlier post on his reporting, plus a folo he did)...

Recommended reading: Lane and Hajdu

Posted on July 28, 2008
I'm back from the mountains: tanned, rested, and ready. Thank goodness I already was tanned before leaving, considering the amount of rain northern New York saw during my week there. But it was a good, unplugged getaway. Before I plunge back in to blogging and real work, a couple of plugs for the two books of legal history by journalist authors that I read when I wasn't hiking or snoozing:Chuck Lane's reason for leaving the Washington Post's Supreme Court beat -- upon his return from book leave he moved to the editorial pages -- was well worth it...

WaPo tries an old trick, and succeeds

Posted on July 28, 2008
There's been much chatter about the Washington Post series "Who Killed Chandra Levy?" Much of that chatter has been on the Post's own site, including the comments attached to a running Reporters' Notebook and in a live chat today with series editor Jeff Leen and reporters Sari Horwitz, Scott Higham, and Sylvia Moreno...

Above the Law's next move

Posted on July 18, 2008
Legal Times' blog reports that Above the Law's David Lat is getting a promotion. He's moving from D.C. to NYC to take a broader role at ATL's parent company, Breaking Media. He tells BLT he'll still write for the law-gossip blog, but he's in the market for a writer whose interest and location may take the blog in new directions...

Heading for the (bigger) hills

Posted on July 18, 2008
One of the little-known facts about LawBeat is that world headquarters is a log home, nestled in the woods several hundred yards off the road, in New York's lovely Finger Lakes region. If blogging actually paid the bills, it would be a pretty sweet gig...

Greenhouse reader chat winds down

Posted on July 18, 2008
Today Linda Greenhouse is wrapping up her turn in the "Talk to the Newsroom" feature, and 40 years at the Times. The Q&A with readers throughout the week has been mildly interesting, but not remotely as memorable as her Week in Review story last Sunday, which I blogged about here -- and which evidently will stand as her last byline in the paper, at least while on staff.

Is Mukasey a reporter's best friend at DOJ?

Posted on July 17, 2008
Intriguing hints in this New York Sun story by Josh Gerstein that Attorney General Michael Mukasey has set the bar higher for prosecutors seeking to question journalists about sources. The story's a bit confusing, and the hints come at the end of the piece...

Levy series critics ask "who cares?"

Posted on July 15, 2008
Is the Washington Post series "Who Killed Chandra Levy?" sensationalism and exploitation, or solid journalism? Put another way, can there be real news value in the story of a single unsolved murder? Or is it transparently cheesy to select for such prominent treatment the story of a pretty, young victim involved in an illicit affair with a married congressman, in a case that was full of media hype until it was forgotten post-9/11? That's the debate raging on the message board attached to the series' reporters' notebook...

Wittes redraws outline of terror-law debate

Posted on July 14, 2008
Miller-McCune magazine just published on its Web site my review of Ben Wittes' book Law and the Long War: The Future of Justice in the Age of Terror. It's from the August issue of this new public-policy magazine.

Greenhouse retrospectives, Parts I and II

Posted on July 12, 2008
Hours after appearing on NPR's Weekend edition for a Q&A with host Linda Wertheimer to talk about her career and where the Supreme Court seems to be headed, Linda Greenouse has published a personal remembrance of her 30 years covering the Court for The New York Times...

Gertner on media: A call for cameras

Posted on July 12, 2008
Massachusetts federal district judge Nancy Gertner makes some thoughtful comments on judges' interactions with the public, and with journalists, in this half-hour interview on Legal Talk Network by hosts Bob Ambrogi and J. Craig Williams. She ends it with a provocative statement, amid a discussion of what judges can do to improve public understanding of the law and courts...

Classic WSJ narrative on "Law and Order" battle

Posted on July 12, 2008
Rebecca Dana weaves a marvelously rich narrative on the front of today's Wall Street Journal about the legal battles between NBC and Dick Wolf, producer of the network's cash cow, "Law and Order." Dana breezes through the parties' long, troubled history and intelligently places the conflict in a broader regulatory context: the end of the rules more than a decade ago that separated production of TV content from its distribution...

Mayer book gets newsy launch

Posted on July 12, 2008
The New Yorker's Jane Mayer is getting serious bounce for her new book of reporting on the Bush administration's legal tactics in the war on terror. The book, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals , isn't due out until next week...

Useful, if slightly stale, report on terror probes

Posted on July 11, 2008
Ari Shapiro's report on today's Morning Edition gets its numbers on the simultaneous decline of terrorism prosecutions and increase in terror-investigation wiretaps from administration critics Human Rights First. But, if anything, the administration's views on why intelligence gathering has eclipsed law enforcement priorities are voiced more clearly and forcefully through Shapiro's sources...

2 legal journos join new UC law school

Posted on July 10, 2008
Erwin Chemerinsky, the founding dean of the new School of Law at the University of California, Irvine, has hired two prominent legal journalists as part of his inaugural team of faculty and administrators. Former longtime LA Times legal writer Henry Weinstein, who took a buyout from the paper recently, will teach in both literary journalism and law...

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