Legal News

Gridiron jabber replaces legalese at Legalities

Posted on December 05, 2008
Maybe this is why the Supreme Court press corps is so distracted lately. A sizable chunk of it -- namely, ABC News' Jan Crawford Greenburg and the Washington Post's Bob Barnes -- have been trash-talking each other over at Greenburg's Legalities blog yesterday and today...

Language corner: Indicted in? Or indicted for?

Posted on December 04, 2008
It's nitpicking time. I used to argue with writers about this all the time. I won, because I was the editor. But I never quite convinced them of my point. Let me try it out here.If I say you were indicted FOR a crime, I am saying that I have decided you did it...

A justice's speech falls in a forest

Posted on December 04, 2008
This is wild: A Supreme Court justice talks about judicial philosophy, with comments on a recent landmark decision. He makes his speech at a politically flavored public event. And yet the SCOTUS press corps is practically silent, as best I can tell. Last night, Justice Samuel Alito was the keynote speaker at The American Spectator's annual Robert L...

Camera ban = pen ban = eyesight ban?

Posted on December 03, 2008
A holiday gift idea for the court that has everything: those memory-erasing flashy things from Men in Black. Evidently a D.C. Circuit panel could have used one last week when its attempt to control news from its court was foiled by an artist with a good memory...

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Internet gambling's murky rules

Posted on December 03, 2008
I just noticed that the Washington Post's Gilbert Gaul followed his Sunday report on cheating scandals in Internet poker -- "Inside Bet," an investigation conducted with "60 Minutes" -- with the legal angle in a front-pager on Monday. The story is an unusually detailed and lucid attempt to answer the question: is Internet gambling illegal? Gaul traces a tangled legislative and regulatory narrative to arrive at the answer -- sort of -- in all its ambivalent, complex glory...

Law blog list duped once again

Posted on December 01, 2008
I'm flattered that the ABA Journal's editors didn't vote me off their law-blog island. For the second year in a row, LawBeat is among the Journal's 100 best law blogs (even though it's more a journalism blog, and even though it doesn't fit the list's description of by a lawyer for lawyers)...

WSJ spots gun angle in pardons-story folo

Posted on November 30, 2008
Amir Efrati uses a reporter's nose, and shoe leather, to document a pattern among many of last week's recipients of presidential pardons. He writes in Friday's Wall Street Journal:On the surface, the list of the 14 people pardoned by the president this week shows few common denominators in terms of time served, geographic location or even type of crime, except that the felonies were non-violent...

"Sting" story months in the making

Posted on November 29, 2008
Christopher Ketcham's story from the upcoming January issue of Vanity Fair shows what a magazine writer can do to break news in a tabloid-friendly murder case -- especially when one side in the case chooses to use publicity as part of its strategy. Ketcham tells the story of Doreen Giuliano, whose 25-year-old son, John Giuca, is serving 25 years to life for the 2003 murder of Mark Fisher, a 20-year-old college student...

Abrams: 650 so far have drunk the Kool-Aid

Posted on November 26, 2008
Dan Abrams -- the NBC legal journalist scheming to hire out working or unemployed journalists as corporate consultants -- tells the Observer's Felix Gillette that in the first five days, he lured 650 journalists to his little honey pot. Gillette describes the early birds as "freelance journalists, people who are writing books and individuals who have recently been laid off or walked away from jobs in the media industry...

Good impending news on NYT legal beat

Posted on November 25, 2008
This morning's reappearance of Adam Liptak's Sidebar column prompted me to wonder anew whether the Times will ever replace Liptak on the national legal-affairs beat. Good news: deputy national editor David Firestone predicts an announced hire is just days away...

LAT gives Prop 8 the drive-by treatment

Posted on November 23, 2008
If this is the best that the LA Times can muster in covering a huge legal issue at a critical turning point, then I pity California voters -- and anyone else in the country, on either side, who's riveted to the Proposition 8 story. For starters, reporter Jessica Garrison tackled a worthwhile and logical angle, which her lede defines in clear and broad terms:In normal political campaigns, election day -- win or lose -- signals the end...

Boiling down without dumbing down

Posted on November 20, 2008
SCOTUSblog's Lyle Denniston performs a feat of summarizing and packaging with this report on a remarkable series of cases that put into practice the Supreme Court's Boumediene v. Bush decision. It's been five months since that landmark decision set new parameters in war-on-terrorism legal challenges...

Recorder plays public-record watchdog

Posted on November 20, 2008
Thanks to a brief and accidental disclosure of a court document meant to be sealed, Dan Levine of The Recorder shines a light on a court's casual decision to conceal public documents -- and a lawyer's demonstrably overblown justification for that sealing...

Abrams' conflict-o-rama

Posted on November 19, 2008
What a colossally bad idea! NBC's chief legal correspondent, Dan Abrams, whose mandate at the network and at MSNBC has steadily shrunk, is starting a consulting firm that puts journalists in the employ of corporate clients. Not only will Abrams and his band of moonlighting journos be opinionators-for-corporate-hire, but the Times' Brian Stetler reports that Abrams will remain as NBC's chief legal analyst...

A Heller post-mortem, finally

Posted on November 18, 2008
In the nearly five months since the Supreme Court's Second Amendment opinion in D.C. v. Heller -- heralded or denounced at the time as a civil liberties landmark -- mainstream journalists have done little to document the making of this major case. Perhaps I missed all of the tick-tock narratives, the personality-driven profiles on the people struggling behind the scenes, the policy-heavy analyses on where we go from here...

Covering the Court: Greenhouse and O'Connor

Posted on November 16, 2008
How Appealing flags this legal-reporting-themed installment of C-SPAN's America & the Courts, with a link to C-SPAN's web stream of the show. I haven't seen it yet, but will soon, provided my trusty DVR worked. (LawBeat's home office is afflicted with the world's slowest DSL connection, so we don't do much web video-watching in these parts...

MLK Family: I have a claim!

Posted on November 15, 2008
Is Martin Luther King's family greedy? That's the focus of a story that the Associated Press' Errin Haines broke on Thursday, which The New York Times followed today. Neither adequately explains to readers how intellectual-property rights work.There's no denying it's news...

WSJ's crime stats smell fishy

Posted on November 15, 2008
Jennifer Forsyth and Leslie Eaton break little new ground in this profile today in The Wall Street Journal of Dallas DA Craig Watkins, who months or even years ago achieved national renown for his aggressive break with Dallas' lock-em-up history. The story traces Watkins' role in reexamining cases of suspected wrongful conviction, and using DNA to exonerate defendants...

SCOTUS reporting on the road (again?)

Posted on November 11, 2008
It's good to see Adam Liptak getting out of the house more. Today's front-pager, datelined Pleasant Grove City, Utah, strikes a more reportorial tone than the scholarly approach that Liptak's iconic predecessor, Linda Greenhouse, typically took to previews of Supreme Court cases...

Mauro to Obama judge-screeners: be patient

Posted on November 11, 2008
Tony Mauro shows what a curious mind and a telephone can do to inject some contrary facts into a speculative discussion. The topic is President-elect Obama's Supreme Court nominations, and whether the three oldest liberals might take Obama's election as their cue to exit soon...

NYT vs. USAT: Is there an echo in here?

Posted on November 09, 2008
Two months after USA Today's Donna Leinwand reported that public defenders in a growing number of states are balking at handling unworkable caseloads, The New York Times' Erik Eckholm reports essentially the same thing. But what a different two months -- and a few other important factors -- can make...

Secret justice? WaPo shrugs; Times shines a light

Posted on November 07, 2008
Should readers care whether justice is determined in secret? You'll get opposing answers to that question by looking at today's New York Times and Washington Post. In the first habeas corpus hearings for Guantanamo detainees in a federal court, U.S. District Judge Richard Leon of Washington, D...

AmLaw mafia rides again

Posted on November 07, 2008
Here at LawBeat, we look for a legal journalism theme in practically anything. It's not hard to find in the latest Time Inc. shakeup. Replacing Money magazine managing editor Eric Schurenberg is Craig Matters, who first landed his job at Money due to his American Lawyer connection to then-Money chief Bob Safian...

To the victors go the backhand

Posted on November 06, 2008
In his report yesterday on California voters' approval of Proposition 8 -- endorsing a state constitutional amendment to reverse the effects of the California Supreme Court decision in favor of same-sex marriage -- NPR's Richard Gonzalez is guilty of telling the news from the losers' perspective...

Court's move right: leaning more than lurching?

Posted on November 04, 2008
Tony Mauro's story in Legal Times isn't so remarkable for its claim that the conservative makeover of the Supreme Court is not yet complete -- it's pegged, after all, to a new law review article, other experts' claims, and Mauro's own reading of the cases -- as it is cheeky for naming names of journalists whose stories Mauro is diplomatically knocking...

Watching Gitmo from afar

Posted on November 03, 2008
Speaking of Guantanamo watchdog journalism, The New York Times' William Glaberson and Margot Williams produced an impressive front-pager today that does what AP's David McFadden did in the story that I praised yesterday, by looking at Gitmo's prospects in the next presidential administration...

Gitmo press corps dwindles at times to three

Posted on November 02, 2008
AP's David McFadden reveals in this story that the original burst of journalist attention paid to Guantanamo Bay trials of terror-suspect detainees has evaporated. He writes:The heyday for journalists seems to be history. Only months ago, the military periodically flew dozens of print reporters, TV crews, pool photographers and sketch artists to Guantanamo Bay from Andrews Air Force Base near Washington...

Digging deeper in judicial campaign finances

Posted on November 01, 2008
There's no shortage of judicial campaign stories -- and horror stories -- this election cycle. A two-part story by Mark Lagerkvist at Judicial Reports this week serves as a useful example of smart reporting that goes beyond the usual stories about attack ads and heavy spending...

LAT/Tribune mashup looks grim

Posted on November 01, 2008
The rumored cutbacks in D.C. at the Los Angeles Times and Tribune Co. bureau suggest bad news, no matter how you cut it, for legal journalism. The combined operation now is home to a diverse crew of legal-affairs and Supreme Court experts, including David Savage, Richard Schmitt, and Jim Oliphant...

The Docket: 10/29

Posted on October 29, 2008
From the criminal to the profane, this week's portfolio of thought-provoking legal journalism has it all. Feel free to send your own thoughts to rsmascarenhas [at] gmail [dot] com.When 15-year-old Bukhari Washington was shot and killed in Newark, police quickly realized that identifying his killer was only the start of the mystery...

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