Legal News

The greening of terror law

Posted on April 26, 2008
Vanity Fair's definition of a "green issue" is remarkably expansive. I refer not only to the Madonna S&M pictorial or the Doris Day tell-all. The legal-reporting goods are in this article by British human rights lawyer Philippe Sands, wittily called "Green [get it? green issue??] Light...

Bell verdict, examined from multiple angles

Posted on April 26, 2008
Stellar work today by a Times team explains what to some may seem inexplicable: the acquittals of police in the shooting death of Sean Bell. Bell was killed in a hail of 50 shots on the day of his wedding outside of a New York strip club. The number of shots makes it easy to jump to the conclusion that the police did wrong...

AmLaw's leap into the blogosphere

Posted on April 24, 2008
The American Lawyer's long-awaited (well, among a select audience) overhaul of its Web site includes a surprisingly ambitious legal-news blog, The AmLaw Daily. It's legal news as defined by the magazine, meaning mostly the business of Am Law 200 firms...

Mauro: Flogging books isn't enough

Posted on April 23, 2008
Legal Times' Tony Mauro uses this USA Today op-ed piece today to chide the Supreme Court for its secretive ways. He pegs this perennial lament to Justice Antonin Scalia's scheduled appearance on Sunday on CBS's "60 Minutes." Mauro admits that when a justice takes to the airwaves to promote a book, the public gains -- but not as much as if the Court were more systematic about its transparency and accountability...

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Hoyt lends column to the Locy cause

Posted on April 20, 2008
Clark Hoyt takes his Times Public Editor column on a detour today, veering from critiques of the Times' work to write a sympathetic piece on Toni Locy and her contempt case. I'm glad for the detour, and for his slant on Locy (see my earlier pro-Locy post)...

How did sex-offender ruling run off the rails?

Posted on April 20, 2008
Pity Jim Leusner. The Orlando Sentinel reporter had a tough assignment on Friday: to explain an esoteric legal principle that had an incendiary result. Judging from the comments that readers posted on his article, he wasn't entirely successful. But I only assign some of the blame for that to him...

Covering polygamists' custody hearing with attitude

Posted on April 19, 2008
I've been closely reading accounts of the child-custody hearing in Texas involving the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. It's a case ready made for all sorts of legal-reporting heroics or sins. First we have odd-looking and -acting people accused of heinous crimes against children...

Harry Potter and the fair-use goblins

Posted on April 18, 2008
Copyright's fair use doctrine gets an unusually thorough airing in this story today by the Journal's Dan Slater, who's analyzing the challenges facing the judge in the trial over infringement claims by Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling against the publisher of an unauthorized reference guide...

Standing-O for "legal" "news" "reporter"

Posted on April 17, 2008
This is great: NBC's Chris Hansen has lots of student groupies who evidently don't appreciate that his "To Catch a Predator" show -- sanctimony from the host aside -- is neither news nor applause-worthy. He manufactures a crime and serves as a law enforcement tool, all to generate shock video that ruins lives and does nothing to solve a real problem...

Holes in Shafer's shield logic

Posted on April 17, 2008
In his two-part rant against a federal shield law (Part 1 and Part 2), Jack Shafer pegs much of his argument to this pair of assertions: (1)  there is no crisis requiring such a legislative response, and (2) limiting the privilege to journalists as legislatively defined puts us on a path to licensing of journalists and turns its back on the blossoming of citizen journalism to favor mainstream corporate media...

Duke loses bid to muzzle students

Posted on April 16, 2008
The N&O reports today that a North Carolina federal judge has rejected Duke University's bizarre and shameful attack on the PR tactics of the lacrosse players who are suing the university. With the end of that controversy, which I previously posted on here, Dukelawsuit...

Friends don't let friends write with POV

Posted on April 16, 2008
Dahlia Lithwick continues the discussion that she started, and I joined, by summarizing her readers' suggestions about what the Supreme Court beat needs most. The big sticking point: whether a beat reporter also should offer straight-up opinion, in the reporter's voice...

Scalia's charm offensive: more charm than offensive

Posted on April 13, 2008
You gotta love him. I've mentioned recently Antonin Scalia's surprising embrace of high-profile appearances (here and here), but I didn't appreciate what he could do with this forum until I watched C-Span's Students & Leaders show aired last Wednesday (I recorded it and finally got to it tonight)...

What the SCOTUS beat needs, Part II

Posted on April 12, 2008
Jack Shafer's and Dahlia Lithwick's recent musings on the future of Supreme Court reporting prompt me to think more about the opportunities that exist with the changing of the guard at the Times. It all started with Shafer's characteristically over-the-top call to abolish "the ugly stranglehold the boomers have over the press," which he evidently sees possible with the replacement of 61-year-old boomer Linda Greenhouse with 47-year-old boomer Adam Liptak...

A book tour, without the book

Posted on April 10, 2008
The Post's Bob Barnes, with a gracious nod to Tony Mauro's earlier report, expands on the Scalia-as-media-debutante theme in this story today that's pegged to yesterday's C-SPAN telecast of the justice's meeting with high school students. Barnes notes that Scalia never bothered to plug his book -- the ostensible reason for his charm offensive -- and adds this depressing reality check on any hopes that greater openness signals a thaw in the cameras debate:Even yesterday, he repeated his opposition to allowing cameras at the court's oral arguments, because he said the clips shown by the media would not accurately represent what happened there...

Dogs and cats lie down together

Posted on April 09, 2008
Jack Shafer's recent rant about useless links in the major papers' Web reports was right on the money. But he might also have noted that the major papers' bloggers might handle this better -- even, remarkably, with links to the competition.Shafer focused on the junk links that papers litter their stories with...

Scalia drinks the "60 Minutes" Kool-Aid

Posted on April 08, 2008
Tony Mauro breaks the news that Justice Antonin Scalia will flog his new book on "60 Minutes" on April 27. What makes the news so remarkable, as Mauro explains fully, isn't the PR strategy -- it's becoming something of a Court tradition -- but the fact that it's Scalia doing it...

A reporter's take on a Reconstruction legal tale

Posted on April 08, 2008
The book that Chuck Lane took leave to work on -- ushering in the Robert Barnes era for Washington Post SCOTUS coverage -- is out, and he's blogging about it at the Volokh Conspiracy (here, here, and here). I can't top Ed Whelan's succinct summary at Bench Memos, which first tipped me off that The Day Freedom Died was published...

Pirates of the courtroom

Posted on April 07, 2008
One of my favorite, most memorable assignments as a young newspaper reporter was to cover treasure hunter Mel Fisher's discovery in 1985 of the Spanish galleon Nuestra Senora de Atocha, still considered one of the great shipwreck finds. True to my nerdy law-reporter roots, I spent part of my time in Key West tracing Fisher's legal history, a tortuous string of battles between academic and profit-minded marine archaeologists (I spent another part of the week partying with Fisher's newly rich divers, but that's another story for another blog)...

Forbes.com: Judicial-reporting hellhole

Posted on April 07, 2008
The junk science on display in the American Tort Reform Association's annual "judicial hellhole" study -- remember, Adam Liptak documented how the rankings are meaningless because the underlying survey has no actual validity, which ATRA cheerfully admitted -- now propagates itself on Forbes...

R. Kelly's "star" chamber

Posted on April 04, 2008
Chicago Sun-Times' Eric Herman reports on the secrecy measures imposed by the judge presiding over the upcoming child porn trial of R. Kelly (pictured here). Sealed motions, a gag order, sealed witness lists, sealed dockets, closed hearings. Gitmo comes to Chi-Town? Actually, Judge Vincent Gaughan may have some valid arguments for the secrecy provisions, as Herman's sources point out...

Liptak's the one

Posted on April 04, 2008
Now that the Times has made the most natural choice of all to replace Linda Greenhouse -- it's Adam Liptak, as first reported by the Observer's John Koblin (who reprints D.C. bureau chief Dean Baquet's memo) -- the first question I have concerns legal affairs reporting in the Times...

Laurie Cohen breaks our hearts again

Posted on April 03, 2008
If Portfolio's Jeff Bercovici is right about this -- and his blog about the media biz is usually spot-on -- Laurie Cohen's return to the Journal, which I recently extolled, was short-lived. But is he right that she's leaving the Journal this time for a hedge fund? That's so 2007!

How censorship will work at Gitmo trials

Posted on April 03, 2008
Carol Rosenberg's story today in the Miami Herald is the most detail I've seen yet on how public the military commission trials will be at Guantanamo, and what access journalists will have. The government, in short, will open the hearings but keep strict control over what reporters see, hear, and report...

Assignment desk: Vaccine case's real meaning

Posted on March 31, 2008
Why does it take a scientist's op-ed piece in the Times to put a much clearer -- or at least nuanced and different -- perspective on a recent court case that alarmed many parents? I haven't paid close enough attention to the fallout from an announcement earlier in March that the government supposedly admitted that vaccines could cause autism...

On the docket: TRO against doomsday

Posted on March 29, 2008
Dennis Overbye, the Times' deputy science editor, deftly and entertainingly meshes the science of physics with the mechanics of law in this front-pager today. He writes about a quirky lawsuit in a Hawaii federal court that seeks to shut down the Large Hadron Collider, which this summer is to begin smashing protons to study the most basic elements of the natural world...

LAT: Call your liability carrier

Posted on March 27, 2008
Well, this is awkward. Less than a day after The Smoking Gun accused the LA Times of publishing a bogus report on supposed revelations into the 1994 attack on rapper Tupac Shakur, the paper and its Pulitzer-winning reporter, Chuck Philips, apologized...

Lichtblau book: full employment for bloggers

Posted on March 27, 2008
The New York Times' Eric Lichtblau sparks a raging debate with excerpts published last night on Slate from his new book, "Bush's Law: The Remaking of American Justice." Lichtblau, who with fellow reporter James Risen broke two of the more notable stories on the administration's post-9/11 surveillance techniques -- warrantless wiretapping by the National Security Agency, and snooping on international financial records -- used his excerpt to telescope in on some of the most interesting journalistic insights the book provides (I've read the galleys, so I can say that with some authority)...

Buyout-bound Linda Greenhouse won't

Posted on March 26, 2008
Buyout-bound Linda Greenhouse won't stay idle for long. She's landing at Yale Law School in January, where, according to a YLS press release she will be:the Knight Distinguished Journalist-in-Residence and Joseph M. Goldstein Senior Fellow. In that capacity, she will advise on the framing and development of the new Yale Law School Law and Media Program (LAMP), work on her own research about the Supreme Court and constitutional law, teach through lectures and seminars, and participate in various Law School activities, including Yale Law School’s Supreme Court Clinic...

IRE winners include "Mississippi Cold Case"

Posted on March 26, 2008
Investigative Reporters & Editors announces its prestigious awards, and legal reporting, as usual, plays a prominent part. Reviewing the list of medalists and certificate winners and finalists always cures me (at least temporarily) of the blues, when I'm down about the prospects for news organizations of all sizes to support important, enterprising, and resource-intensive journalism...

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