Legal News

Making sense of the Wyeth ruling

Posted on March 08, 2009
Does the Supreme Court favor businesses, or the people who sue businesses? Rather than rely on lazy, oversimplified, ideological labeling -- the "conservative" and "pro-business" Roberts Court took a surprising detour into pro-plaintiff, liberal territory in last week's decision in Wyeth v...

Wrongful-conviction documentary screening

Posted on March 07, 2009
The Carnegie Legal Reporting Program is proud to be a co-sponsor of this April 7 screening of the documentary 'Blanchard Road: A Murder in the Finger Lakes,' on the wrongful murder conviction of Auburn, N.Y.'s Roy Brown. After the 6 p.m. film screening, Brown and filmmaker Alex Dunbar, a Newhouse School graduate, will discuss the case and the film in an audience Q&A.

Another trial-Twitter roundup

Posted on March 06, 2009
Roxana Hegeman filed this AP report giving an overview of federal court access issues pegged to Ron Sylvester's trial-tweeting experiment in Wichita. It's a thorough but not groundbreaking story. Because it's AP, it's bound to raise the profile of such advances -- and maybe convince a few more trial judges to take the plunge.

How to add spice to Ginsburg story

Posted on March 06, 2009
USA Today's Joan Biskupic gets Justice Ruth Ginsburg's first post-surgery interview, which the paper played out front. The short, one-source story is a feel-good piece -- not that there's anything wrong with that. Ginsburg undoubtedly agreed to talk to signal that she is not near death or about to vacate her seat...

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Behind the Post's Guandique interviews

Posted on March 05, 2009

Blogger flyspecks Ledbetter coverage

Posted on March 05, 2009

Reporting by the Simon method

Posted on March 02, 2009

Abrams on media and presuming innocence

Posted on February 27, 2009

Courthouse reporter's confessions

Posted on February 27, 2009

Wichita reporter tweets from federal trial

Posted on February 26, 2009
Ron Sylvester, the Wichita Eagle reporter I blogged about last month, continues his push to expand trial coverage via Twitter. He's convinced a Kansas federal judge to allow him to use the social-networking tool from the courtroom in a criminal trial that began this week...

Questions in Kent case need answers

Posted on February 26, 2009
After a bizarre back and forth throughout the day, the Florida federal judge called in to hear the prosecution of a Texas federal judge has lifted his gag order on lawyers and witnesses in the case. Judge Robert Vinson had left the gag order in place since Monday's guilty plea by Samuel Kent, who stepped down from his judgeship when pleading guilty to obstruction of justice in a case featuring accusations that he sexually abused women who worked for him...

Levy media pack reassembles

Posted on February 25, 2009
McClatchy's Michael Doyle has documented media coverage of this latest phase of the Chandra Levy murder case, adding to what he's already done on his blog in multiple posts about the Levy investigation. As usual, I'm left dumfounded over what might spark a particular news frenzy...

Prop 8 preview takes brainy detour

Posted on February 24, 2009
Greg Moran is a brave reporter -- and, evidently, one who has his editors' trust. It's not often that a courthouse reporter can sell his editors on a story about a new legal standard that's applied to certain cases. But that's what this San Diego Union-Tribune courts reporter did to preview next week's oral arguments in the California same-sex-marriage battle...

Rochester judges: masters of their domain

Posted on February 23, 2009
Here's a wonderful example of a local newspaper's commitment to public access to court records. David Andreatta of Rochester's Democrat & Chronicle demonstrates convincingly that local civil courts -- through carelessness or worse -- have routinely kept crucial documents out of publicly accessible files...

Gag order persists despite guilty plea

Posted on February 23, 2009
Speaking of judges who forget they're public servants, the visiting judge hearing the unprecedented criminal prosecution of U.S. District Judge Samuel Kent persists in limiting legitimate public scrutiny of the case -- and continues to catch subtle hell from the Houston Chronicle's Mary Flood...

Note to Gary Condit: Our bad!

Posted on February 21, 2009
If today's news about the Chandra Levy case proves true, and D.C. police charge the suspect identified in last summer's Washington Post series that I praised here, then a few legal-reporting reminders are in order:1. Former Rep. Gary Condit's experience at the hands of police and journalists should join the Hall of False-Accusation Shame...

WSJ cuts lead Law Blog reporter

Posted on February 21, 2009
The Wall Street Journal's Law Blog lost its primary writer to newspaper-wide staff cuts. Dan Slater posted a brief goodbye yesterday, and I confirmed that he was the one staff sacrifice that the Journal's law group was told to make earlier this month...

Indecent? Obscene? Whatever.

Posted on February 20, 2009
Call me Mr. Picky. But I wonder if this dumb mistake would have been made if Fox News covered the Supreme Court regularly, or had legally smart producers reading copy before it's published or aired. In this Web report, Lee Ross confuses obscenity with indecency in a report on whether the Supreme Court will hear the Janet Jackson "wardrobe malfunction" case...

Corporate crime reference misses mark

Posted on February 19, 2009
Lynnley Browning's front-pager in the Times on the $780 million settlement between the federal government and UBS -- a deal casting a harsh light on Swiss banking practices -- contains a curious graf near the end:The move by UBS to settle the case, on the eve of a Senate subcommittee hearing next Tuesday on the matter, signals how close the bank came to being indicted for not cooperating with prosecutors...

Creative storytelling about the new AG

Posted on February 18, 2009
When I heard Steve Inskeep's intro of this Ari Shapiro piece on NPR's Morning Edition, I had my skeptic's hat on (it's a rather handsome piece of headwear, but I'll save details on that for another post). Shapiro's relatively lengthy report (nearly eight minutes) focused on Eric Holder's innovation as U...

Florida foreclosures, from the inside of a courtroom

Posted on February 18, 2009
The Journal's Michael Corkery turns the foreclosure crisis into a vivid vignette in this piece today focusing on how Florida courts are dealing with a glut of cases. The story's brisk pace and human touches -- ending with a woman silently crying as a busy court system churns through its backlog -- belie its mastery of the relevant facts about the housing market, the law, and court-administration realities...

Legal journos reap awards

Posted on February 17, 2009
Two recent journalism awards, including the top-shelf Polk Awards, included legal reporters among their honorees. The Polk for justice reporting went to Ryan Gabrielson and Paul Giblin for "Reasonable Doubt," a five-part series in The East Valley Tribune on Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio's campaign against illegal immigrants in and around Phoenix...

Riling the viewers with a pointless story

Posted on February 16, 2009
In her 90-second broadcast report, and an accompanying text story on the Web, reporter and weekend anchor Jen Hale at Birmingham, Alabama's NBC affiliate, WVTM Channel 13, treats seriously a state legislator's proposal that flies directly in the face of last year's Supreme Court ruling barring capital punishment for raping but not killing a child...

When Don met Adam, and the things he said

Posted on February 15, 2009
What's most remarkable about Adam Liptak's front-pager today on the pending Supreme Court case on judicial ethics and independence, Caperton v. Massey, is not simply that Liptak reported from the field rather than just from the briefs and from talking-head experts...

Caperton resource page: pluses and minuses

Posted on February 13, 2009
Justice at Stake, the Soros-funded goo-goos campaigning to rein in or abolish judicial elections (that's what it means in its slogan about "working for fair and impartial courts"), has built this impressive resource site on the pending Caperton v. Massey case...

Autism battle still awaits a full takeout

Posted on February 13, 2009
Nearly 11 months ago, I prodded the Times to dig more deeply into the autism-and-vaccines controversy -- a health story, but with a major legal angle, as parents seek compensation on claims that common vaccines can cause autism. Back then, it shocked me that the clearest perspective on developments at that time came in an op-ed, rather than through enterprising reporting...

Court records access battle bursts into view

Posted on February 13, 2009
John Schwartz tells a fascinating story today about a controversy over the federal courts' PACER records system. This has been going on awhile, but under my radar (I guess my ballooning blog-reading list still isn't large enough). The heart of the story -- about Public...

Local paper revealed kickback probe months ago

Posted on February 13, 2009
Like many readers of The New York Times, I was shocked to read today of the judicial scandal in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., where two judges stand convicted of taking millions in kickbacks for sending juveniles to a privately owned lockup. But local residents have had quite a while to get used to the shock, thanks to long-running, hard-hitting coverage of the federal investigation by Dave Janoski and his colleagues at the Citizens Voice...

Behind NY's "merit" selection of chief judge

Posted on February 13, 2009
The legendary Wayne Barrett accomplished two feats in this story about the political levers pulled to put Jonathan Lippman in the chief judge seat of New York's highest court, the Court of Appeals: he showed how uninspired the Times and other newspapers in the state have been in covering such a crucial judicial appointment; and he provided a stark reminder that so-called merit selection is not the squeaky-clean alternative to elections that it's cracked up to be -- especially in the Empire State, home of shameless machine politics and backroom deals masquerading as democracy...

Revealing the story behind juvenile-suicide report

Posted on February 12, 2009
I love it when a small trade publication breaks a good story. Kudos to John Kelly of Youth Today, a newspaper for youth-services professionals, for revealing the backstory behind a newly released report on states' failures to prevent suicides in juvenile lockups...

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