Legal News

O'Connor's legacy: a slow-moving target

Posted on June 10, 2008
Joan Biskupic has a thoughtful, high-altitude view of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's legacy on the front of today's USA Today. The only thing that's curious about it is its timing. What's the hook? The story seems to say, in essence, that while O'Connor's carefully crafted compromise rulings took some hits last term, they've fared a little better this term -- so far...

Toobin on Stone and Spitzer: No there there

Posted on June 05, 2008
Jeff Toobin's recent piece on Roger Stone drew a sideswipe from Kathleen Parker, at National Review Online's "The Corner." She couldn't come right out and accuse Toobin of plagiarism, but she crows about noticing similarities between his New Yorker profile of the Republican prankster/hitman and this piece last November in The Weekly Standard by Matt Labash...

Post yawns over Times regulatory scoop

Posted on June 04, 2008
How lame. This is the Washington Post's folo to the Times' scoop last Saturday on the Bush administration's regulatory strategy: a Bloomberg column on page D3, published three days later. If the Post believes the Times blew the story, or blew it out of proportion, it should report and write that...

Inside the post-Abu Ghraib security machine

Posted on June 02, 2008
Alissa Rubin's on-the-ground reporting succeeds at elevating this story on the American system of detention and trial of Iraqi terror suspects from generalities to specifics. Loaded with numbers and animated with examples, from her observations of hearings held to decide whether to hold or release prisoners, the story is a clear example of why such reporting done from afar cannot hope to provide a clear enough picture...

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Savage jumps to the head of the class

Posted on May 31, 2008
That didn't take long. Charlie Savage's first New York Times byline is played above the fold on A1, and as the lead on the Web's "today's paper" page. He shares a byline with Robert Pear, but still it's clear: he's getting a lotta love from the editors since moving his D...

Scalia's reflexive answer about journalism needs rethinking

Posted on May 30, 2008
Dan Slater interviewed Justice Antonin Scalia about his book and for general musings at The Wall Street Journal's Law Blog (parts one, two, and three). The interview concludes with a good question about Scalia's journalism critique, now that he's been attracting ample coverage on the book tour, and has generally been a talkative, engaging interviewee wherever he has appeared...

Maudlin emotion in polygamist ranch coverage

Posted on May 30, 2008
Back in the day, CNN Headline News was an actual headline news service: the latest news stories, told in rapid-fire succession. It was a reliable place to tune in when you wanted a quick news update. In recent years, however, it's devolved into a carnival of smarmy showmanship, with entertainers using news as a jumping-off point to vent rage at easy targets...

R. Kelly faceoff: Trib wins

Posted on May 29, 2008
What's more important: good reporting or good writing? Here's a side by side comparison from coverage of the R. Kelly trial in Chicago that shows the ugly downside of having a bad dose of both.On Wednesday night, both the Chicago Tribune and Chicago's CBS 2 published stories on their Web sites about a surprise twist in the Kelly trial...

Denver Post wins big in ABA Gavel contest

Posted on May 27, 2008
The American Bar Association has announced this year's Silver Gavel Awards. There are four -- in books, documentary, newspapers, and television -- plus six honorable mentions. Most notably, a single newspaper -- The Denver Post -- took both the award and honorable mention in newspapers...

LAT's terror-trial profile needs a folo

Posted on May 27, 2008
Josh Meyer profiles the Navy Reserve JAG officer defending Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, whom Meyer describes as "the world's most notorious captured terrorist." The profile of Prescott Prince benefits from good timing (it's early in the military commission trial of the infamous KSM), prominence (front-page in Sunday's LA Times), and access (Prince spoke at length to Meyer, despite unhelpful military restrictions)...

A daringly early take on High Court patterns

Posted on May 23, 2008
Linda Greenhouse's penchant for thematic conclusions about the Supreme Court's output is on display today at a remarkably early point in the term. As every Court-watcher knows, the hardest cases -- those most likely to split the Court, and the cases that typically are most newsworthy -- come in June, as the term winds down...

Wanted: real courthouse reporters in Boston

Posted on May 21, 2008
What's wrong with the Boston papers? A respected bankruptcy judge gets arrested and pleads no contest to DWI and DWCD -- driving while intoxicated and driving while in a cocktail dress. He resigns, then reconsiders. And then ... nothing. No reporter evidently has good enough sources on the district court bench or the 1st Circuit to report on why the May 15 deadline on the judge's status has come and gone...

A long, long feature with little purpose

Posted on May 20, 2008
Adam Higginbotham's profile of William Heirens in GQ leaves me cold. Titled "The Long, Long Life of the Lipstick Killer," the feature uses about 6,000 words -- admittedly nicely crafted words -- to paint a picture of a decrepit prison inmate who may, or may not, be wrongfully imprisoned for three infamous murders in post-WWII Chicago...

Spears-mania? Eh.

Posted on May 19, 2008
This AP story by Sandy Cohen, on the months-long media frenzy over the child-custody battle between Britney Spears and Kevin Federline, makes me feel like a visitor from another planet. And I want to go home now.Am I the only one who not only finds these folks' fame inexplicable, but who can't recall seeing even one installment of what Cohen portrays as a daily, intense media storm over this ongoing proceeding in (where else) L...

Liptak's balancing act

Posted on May 19, 2008
Adam Liptak has now served his time in the Times' "Talk to the Newsroom" feature. Looks like it was a lot of work, considering that the reader questions he chose were mainly substantive, and from all over the legal and U.S. map. There were, however, a few legal-reporting moments worth sharing...

Beat reporter gets chief justice to talk

Posted on May 18, 2008
The LA Times' California Supreme Court reporter, Maura Dolan, produced a revealing piece on Chief Justice Ronald George, author of Thursday's 4-3 majority opinion holding that the state's ban on same-sex marriage violates the state constitution. Dolan reports that George sat for a two-hour interview, and shares his thoughts about the case's place in history and how the opposing justices reflected honest differences of opinion without rancor...

Note to Oregon pol: Don't ask Enron reporter for a blurb

Posted on May 16, 2008
John Kroger, a candidate in next week's Democratic primary for Oregon attorney general, has just published a memoir, Convictions: A Prosecutor's Battles against Mafia Killers, Drug Kingpins, and Enron Thieves. Willamette Week reviewer Matt Buckingham called it "a thoughtful, compulsively readable assessment of the American justice system’s struggles with the greatest social evils of our time...

Heads up about same-sex marriage ruling

Posted on May 14, 2008
Now here's an innovation worth copying. The California Supreme Court announced a day in advance that it will make news in a particular case -- its ruling on whether a ban on same-sex marriage violates the state constitution. The notice of the impending ruling, at 10 a...

To the authors goes the access

Posted on May 14, 2008
USA Today's Joan Biskupic and ABC's Jan Crawford Greenburg both cashed in on their relationships with former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor to produce pieces today advancing O'Connor's public testimony about her husband's Alzheimer's. Biskupic, who wrote a biography of the justice three years ago, snagged a copy of O'Connor's written testimony, but no interview...

Scruggs scoop has some problems

Posted on May 12, 2008
The usually fabulous Jerry Mitchell has a scoop in yesterday's Clarion-Ledger in the Dickie Scruggs case, but it's marred by two problems. First, Mitchell's sourcing is opaque. He declares in his lede that "Justice Department officials now are looking at racketeering as a possible next charge to pursue against the legendary trial lawyer...

A "testilying" story misses its target

Posted on May 12, 2008
Benjamin Weiser's piece today in the Times goes off half-cocked. Weiser examined more than 1,000 cases in which a convicted felon was caught with a gun and whose case was transferred to federal court. He found 20 cases where judges distrusted cops' testimony enough to toss the evidence...

Liptak interview on "American Exception" series

Posted on May 08, 2008
NPR's "Fresh Air" features Adam Liptak in a discussion about his "American Exception" series, which I've raved about here and here. Mostly it's a stroll through the many topics Liptak explored in the series, starting with his latest installment, on imprisonment rates...

Thoughts on the Thurman-stalker jury story

Posted on May 07, 2008
Emily Steel is taking some flak for her tell-all story about serving on the jury that convicted Uma Thurman's stalker. New York's Noelle Hancock says that the A1 play is yet more proof that Rupert Murdoch really owns the Journal. Blame Murdoch if you must, but a newspaper would have to be brain dead not to publish this story, and play it prominently, once it lucked out with a reporter picked for the jury...

Scalia on the breakdown of anonymity

Posted on May 07, 2008
Tony Mauro zeroes in on a gem of a comment by Justice Antonin Scalia in a C-Span interview about why he's made peace with the notion of playing a more public role. Apologies to my reader(s) for the slow pace here. It's because of the fast pace in that part of my work that pays the bills...

A "poisonous tree" grows in Iowa

Posted on May 03, 2008
Here's another small-market crime-reporting investigation of note: "Fruit of the Poisonous Tree," a two-week series ending today in the Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Gazette. It was led by reporter Jennifer Hemmingsen. Packaged in multimedia on a slick site, the series had as its starting point our old reporting friend -- curiosity...

Tracking the "Janklow 36" in South Dakota

Posted on May 03, 2008
Are early prison release programs safe? That's the question that the Sioux Falls, S.D., Argus Leader assigned 10 reporters to answer by tracing what happened to 36 South Dakota prison inmates released en masse 22 years ago -- the so-called "Janklow 36," named for the governor who commuted the sentences...

Drawing a bead on Client 9

Posted on April 30, 2008
Dallas-based Fortune writer Peter Elkind -- a veteran of long-form legal coverage in the magazine and in books -- landed a fat contract to produce an Eliot Spitzer book for Penguin Portfolio, the Observer's Leon Neyfakh reports. Interesting twist: His collaborator is filmmaker Alex Gibney, whose Spitzer documentary will be timed to coincide with the book's publication...

Bell judge: just another unhappy customer

Posted on April 29, 2008
The Daily News' Nicole Bode gets Judge Arthur Cooperman on the phone long enough to hear him unload on journalists who tried to talk to him at home over the weekend. "That's not journalism," says the judge whose ruling in the Sean Bell police shooting was a big story in New York City...

Mauro fills in some blanks

Posted on April 28, 2008
Tony Mauro explains more about the private musings by Antonin Scalia that Lesley Stahl used to good effect in her "60 Minutes" interview (How Appealing links to CBS's video and transcript versions). Mauro also critiques high points from the Scalia/Bryan Garner book on legal writing.

Scalia on "60 Minutes": a brilliant portrait

Posted on April 27, 2008
Lesley Stahl and her producer Ruth Streeter deliver a smart, entertaining portrait of Justice Antonin Scalia. I've been hard on "60 Minutes" for failing its storied history, including recently. But not this time. Scalia displays his feisty charm, and Stahl covers the substantive arguments while giving viewers a full-on view of the dynamism that is Scalia...

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