Legal News

Kristof's anthrax apology doesn't overreact

Posted on August 28, 2008
Times reporter-columnist Nicholas Kristof (pictured here) has written the public apology to Steven Hatfill that the paper's public editor, Clark Hoyt, referred to nearly two weeks ago. But if Hoyt, Hatfill, or Times critics hoped that Kristof would go beyond simple regret to renounce aggressive coverage of uncharged criminal suspects, they'll be disappointed...

Where are the Biden legal profiles?

Posted on August 28, 2008
Journalists are starting to outline Joe Biden's legal-policy stances (as onetime chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee) and his political affiliation with trial lawyers in tort-reform debates. Two stories flagged by Overlawyered -- in yesterday's USA Today by Ken Dilanian and today's LA Times by Chuck Neubauer and Tom Hamburger -- examined various aspects of Biden's longtime policy preference for plaintiffs, his alliance and financial dependence on their lawyers, and the ethical implications of his opposition to asbestos-litigation reforms while his son and a former aide stood to gain...

Barbie v. Bratz: a fizzled ending

Posted on August 27, 2008
The Journal's Nicholas Casey and his editors have given enormous amounts of smart coverage to the dispute between Mattel and MGA Entertainment over the rights to the Bratz line of dolls. From a front-page preview of the trial through weeks of testimony and post-verdict wrangling, the paper was all over the story...

Making news from an obscenity case's hiatus

Posted on August 26, 2008
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's Paula Reed Ward gets a gold star for curiosity, memory, and perseverance in this story about a case that federal prosecutors once bragged about but have seemingly deep-sixed. Ward traces the five-year history of an obscenity prosecution against Extreme Associates, a California pornographer...

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Did Katrina-litigation reporters hide sources' motives?

Posted on August 25, 2008
The imprisoned former personal-injury star lawyer Dickie Scruggs still has investigators -- and Fortune's Roger Parloff -- on his trail. Parloff wrote a long, powerful feature on Scruggs' case in April. And now he's used his blog, Legal Pad, to track what's happened since -- as he phrases it, to "put that new evidence in some context, add some original reporting, and mention a few things that look important to me that haven’t been noted yet...

Localizing child-porn prosecution story with data and examples

Posted on August 24, 2008
Howard Mintz of the San Jose Mercury News provides this overview of the big increase in child-porn prosecutions by federal authorities. He notes both the nationwide caseload and the local scene, colored in by examples of men caught possessing or trafficking in illegal images and now facing stiff prison terms...

Greenhouse exit interview: good overview, few surprises

Posted on August 23, 2008
I finally had a chance to watch C-SPAN's interview with Linda Greenhouse, which aired Aug. 16 on its "America and the Courts" series. No great surprises for serious watchers of the Supreme Court and its press corps. But it's a wonderful piece of plainspoken, accessible public education about the Court's role, and secondarily about the press' work...

DOJ punches back, but misses

Posted on August 22, 2008
Joe Palazzolo at Legal Times' BLT posts about this interesting twist in a story that AP has been following. In her report on the Justice Department's decision to delay new rules designed to help the FBI track terror suspects, Lara Jakes Jordan drew an unusually pointed attack from DOJ flacks in this release titled “Setting the Record Straight: AP's Misleading Article on the Proposed Changes to the Attorney General's Guidelines...

Death case yields a just-in-time lesson on law

Posted on August 21, 2008
Allan Turner and Rosanna Ruiz wrote a compact, informative, and well-researched story for today's front page of the Houston Chronicle, informing the raging debate over tonight's scheduled execution of Jeff Wood. Wood faces the death sentence for the murder of a convenience store clerk during a robbery...

Abrams' "Verdict" gets bumped

Posted on August 20, 2008
The Times' Bill Carter is reporting that NBC chief legal correspondent Dan Abrams is losing his evening MSNBC program "Verdict," in a shift to more partisan political programming (just what the world needs... ugh). That downgrades the network's legal-issues coverage, which is a shame...

Murder or manslaughter? Sorry, just the facts

Posted on August 19, 2008
Here's an example of a verdict story that's long on facts and short on the law. Albany Times-Union reporter Bob Gardinier does a decent job of explaining key testimony in the trial of a man charged with second-degree murder in a street-fight stabbing...

Time explores another drug-and-murder capital

Posted on August 19, 2008
There's a depressing sameness to this Time story on Culiacan, and it's not the fault of the magazine or its writers, Tim Padgett and Ioan Grillo. In what the story calls "the sweltering cradle of Mexico's $25 billion-a-year drug-trafficking industry," Padget and Grillo -- with a powerful photo gallery on the Web by Anthony Suau -- competently and compellingly describe a town overrun with narco-murders and money...

Soldiers in hock and a legal shield with holes

Posted on August 18, 2008
Adam Hochberg has latched onto a hot issue in this NPR Morning Edition story today about the law's failure to protect military personnel serving in Iraq. The story has some problems, but deserves attention and praise nonetheless. At issue are debt-related disputes that service members' families find themselves in -- foreclosure on a home, or repossession of a car or other big purchase, after the spouse stuck at home falls behind on debt payments -- and the federal law that's supposed to protect service members' families from these problems...

Sound advice on when to name suspects

Posted on August 17, 2008
Times public editor Clark Hoyt treats one of the toughest legal reporting issues -- whether and when to identify criminal suspects by name before charges are filed -- thoughtfully and fairly. But some of the most thoughtful and fair comments come not in Hoyt's voice, but from one of his quoted sources, L...

Psychiatric patients' rights vs. safety

Posted on August 16, 2008
Elizabeth Bernstein and Nathan Koppel use a tragic case of matricide in Maine to spotlight the public-policy tensions between public safety and psychiatric patients' rights. Their powerful front-pager today in The Wall Street Journal -- bolstered by access to records showing how advocates sent William Bruce home, depriving him of care in a psychotic state -- focuses on the government-funded Protection and Advocacy for Individuals with Mental Illness program, or PAIMI, created by Congress in reaction to reports of abuse and neglect of the mentally ill in institutions...

Secret military justice documented in pair of studies

Posted on August 15, 2008
Thanks in part to a survey conducted by the Tully Center for Free Speech -- located just down the hall from me and headed by my Newhouse School colleague, broadcast journalist and media-law expert Barbara Fought -- the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press has just published an important and damning study documenting the barriers to public access in the military justice system...

Schiavo coverage medically flawed, study says

Posted on August 15, 2008
A new study documenting inaccuracies in four newspapers' coverage of the Terri Schiavo case focuses on the medical facts in hundreds of stories, rather than on the political and legal aspects. Here's the editors' synopsis of the study by five researchers in the journal Neurology of coverage from 1990 through 2005 in The New York Times, Washington Post, Tampa Tribune, and St...

Stiff-arming an "unGoogle" demand

Posted on August 15, 2008
I hope there's a press-freedom award in the works for the student editors, past and present, at Seattle Pacific University's student paper -- and a special place in hell for the folks who run their school. As Isaac Amsdorf reports today in the Seattle Times, the students have resisted heavy-handed pressure from their school over a long period of time in a dispute with a former student who's unhappy that an embarrassing 10-year-old story about him remains accessible on the Web...

Weak explanation of Stevens defense

Posted on August 15, 2008
One of the great challenges of writing about the law is fitting cogent explanations into tight spaces without repelling lay readers with overly technical explanations (actually, that sounds like several challenges wrapped in one, but you take my point)...

Edwards scandal: a half-baked scoop

Posted on August 14, 2008
I'm not trying to obsess about Ted Frank, despite our little scuffle earlier this week. But when I saw this item on the fallout from the John Edwards adultery story, I couldn't hold back. This ought to be framed and hung on the wall of every journalism school...

Jack Goldsmith hates a free press!

Posted on August 13, 2008
OK, maybe that headline is a bit overstated. But I can't help but suspect that's the bottom line after a remarkable exchange of erudite volleys between former Justice Department legal policymaker Jack Goldsmith and The New York Times' Eric Lichtblau. I wrote here about Goldsmith's sharp attack in The New Republic on Licthblau's national-security reporting...

News from Mahler book starts to dribble out

Posted on August 11, 2008
Now this is the kind of juicy reporting that I wished a reviewer would pluck out of Jonathan Mahler's new Gitmo-justice book, The Challenge. Thanks to Pro Publica's Eric Umansky, a close reading of the book yielded a newsy tidbit about the Hamdan case, complete with links to the relevant excerpt and the book's prologue.

Frank vs. Forbes: Correction or spin?

Posted on August 11, 2008
Ted Frank of the American Enterprise Institute is one of several experts that Forbes senior editor Daniel Fisher quotes in this story about the likely fate of federal tort-reform policy, depending on who wins the presidential election. But Frank isn't just any old source...

Judge-bashing panel bashes media

Posted on August 10, 2008
Based on this report in Judicial Reports, I'd have to conclude that the organizers of a panel discussion at the ABA Annual Meeting are as guilty as the journalists their panelists took aim at. The charges? Bias, unfairness, and blaming a class of professionals without digging into the facts...

Burrough on Mahler: Writing, not reporting, is key

Posted on August 10, 2008
The Times Book Review assigned a heavyweight journalist to review the latest book by a journalist on law in the war on terror. But reviewer Bryan Burrough is so fixated on storytelling technique that I barely learned anything about the substance of Jonathan Mahler's The Challenge: Hamdan v...

Small news site challenges El Paso court secrecy

Posted on August 10, 2008
A news Web site in El Paso, Texas, is raising hell about the secrecy imposed by a federal judge and law enforcement officials in the courtroom phase of a long-running public-corruption investigation. The Newspaper Tree reported last Wednesday that it had renewed a battle that last May yielded an order by U...

Abrams' bully pulpit: a lost opportunity?

Posted on August 08, 2008
Why does NBC's Dan Abrams think it's his place to spout off with his opinions about stories he's covered and other political goings-on? Couldn't a chief legal correspondent for one of the networks -- one who, by the way, usually does a thoughtful job in how he handles his work on the air -- instead use his forum at the ABA Annual Meeting to talk about the role of the reporter, or relations between press and bar, or to agitate for improved public understanding of the law? Just asking!

Circumstantial Evidence 101 on NPR

Posted on August 08, 2008
After a report by Laura Sullivan that was described as the "first sit-down interview" with anthrax suspect Bruce Ivins' attorney, Paul Kemp, NPR's Ari Shapiro used his reporting to contribute to the ongoing debate over the strength of the government's case against Ivins...

Announcing a new reporting fellowships program

Posted on August 07, 2008
One of my best experiences as a student happened in grad school at the Missouri j-school. I was in the Washington Reporting Program, and the director at the time, Steve Weinberg, got a call from a freelancer who needed help from a student researcher. Steve recommended me...

Jurors and reporters gagged after Rochester verdict

Posted on August 06, 2008
This one's close to home. A Rochester federal judge who's scheduled to sentence three people later this month has reaffirmed his order barring jurors from talking to anyone about their deliberations and, remarkably, barred anyone (including reporters) from contacting them...

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