Legal News

Con-law 101: legal standing made interesting

Posted on February 12, 2009
Jess Bravin provides a primer on legal standing in today's Wall Street Journal (sub. req.) -- not a sure-fire crowd pleaser, but his conversational, example-filled story does a marvelous job of explain an abstract theory to lay readers. The hook for the story is a lawsuit challenging Hillary Clinton's legal right to hold the office of Secretary of State...

CQ's new reported blog on the courts

Posted on February 10, 2009
Congressional Quarterly has launched an important addition to legal reporting (and I emphasize reporting) with the new blog Legal Beat, by legal affairs writers Keith Perine and Seth Stern. The site describes itself thusly:Legal Beat chronicles the relationship and tensions between Congress and the courts...

Newsflash: Obama hates freedom!

Posted on February 10, 2009
Shame on Evan Perez and the headline writers at The Wall Street Journal. To report on appellate arguments yesterday in San Francisco, they spun the news as political backpedaling by the administration -- but backpedaling on the wrong thing. Here's the hed and two lede grafs:Rendition Case Under Bush Gets Obama BackingThe Obama administration backed the Bush administration's arguments in a lawsuit involving the practice of seizing terror suspects abroad and sending them to third countries for questioning...

Ginsburg coverage insensitive? Phooey!

Posted on February 07, 2009
I didn't write until now about this week's news coverage of Justice Ruth Ginsburg's cancer surgery because I didn't see anything remarkable among reports by SCOTUS beat reporters or other major news organizations. But Tony Mauro's story in the upcoming issue of Legal Times suggests -- and not for the first time -- that what journalists consider routine scrutiny of the justices' lives, the Court may see as intrusive and gauche...

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Big play for leaked forensic science report

Posted on February 05, 2009
The Times' Solomon Moore previews the upcoming release of a National Academy of Sciences report on flawed scientific practices that law enforcement have used to convict "thousands of defendants for nearly a century." His writing rings with authority, providing useful legal, scientific, and historical context intelligently and clearly...

Scalia fan club decreases by (at least) one

Posted on February 04, 2009
Interesting Antonin Scalia outburst in Florida, according to these accounts by Tony Mauro and the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. Let's see if I have this straight: While defending an improper (but all too common) content-based decision to limit public access to Court proceedings, Scalia attacks a student for asking a thoroughly reasonable question about the Court's public accountability...

Time beats anti-death-penalty drum

Posted on February 04, 2009
Reacting to Richard Lacayo's story in Time -- a story declaring that "The Tide Shifts Against the Death Penalty" -- Sentencing Law and Policy blogger Doug Berman calls the timing "interesting." And he doesn't mean that as a compliment. Berman, an oft-quoted expert, wrote:As regular readers know, I have been documenting death penalty's decline for quite sometime...

Olson on me on Olson on CPSIA press

Posted on February 03, 2009
Walter Olson adds to his comments on anemic press coverage of the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act, claiming to echo my earlier thoughts but actually advancing the ball because he has put much more work and thought into it. The logrolling continues.

Check out TheCrimeReport.org

Posted on February 02, 2009
A big part of my daily legal-news diet just moved to a new and fancier home. Here's the announcement about Crime & Justice News:After nearly six years, Crime & Justice News is expanding and moving to a new web site. As of today, CJN is based at TheCrimeReport...

Consumer controversy still off some radars

Posted on February 01, 2009
Two weeks ago, I marveled at the virtual news blackout that major news organizations had given a controversy that has been roiling small businesses and consumer groups for months. (I'll lazily rely on that previous post to provide background on the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act, or CPSIA...

Drug-war anecdote: great narrative, thin meaning

Posted on February 01, 2009
Today's Washington Post Magazine cover story reminds me of a put-down that my newspaper buddies and I had for a certain type of magazine story: "pretty writing." We meant that magazine artistes were infamous for reading the product of our original news reporting, and then swooping into town to write a feature that had lots of words but not much new insight or information...

More special treatment for judge-defendant?

Posted on January 31, 2009
There he goes again. Nearly five months after he imposed a strict gag order in the criminal prosecution of U.S. District Judge Samuel Kent -- a gag order that neither party asked for, and in the absence of any sort of media circus -- the visiting judge from Florida hearing the case in Houston has ordered that certain routine filings in the case be filed under seal...

Schwartz sets smart benchmark for new beat

Posted on January 30, 2009
Now this is encouraging: One of John Schwartz's first significant pieces as the new legal-affairs national reporter at the Times -- and his first in that role with a "news analysis" bug -- tackles an unlikely topic in a clear, engaging way. Is there a new federalism blooming, he asks? Through examples and experts, Schwartz explores a story that's more regulatory than courts-driven; more evolutionary than events-driven; and more about ideas and government theory than about conflict and crisis...

Taylor: Ledbetter law news coverage stank

Posted on January 30, 2009
Journalists covering Congress' passage of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act have "thoroughly distorted the facts" in that policy debate, continuing a pattern that began with "an explosion of ill-informed media outrage" after Ledbetter's Supreme Court loss in 2007...

Epic tale of Eli Lilly's Zyprexa battles

Posted on January 30, 2009
Ben Wallace-Wells' masterful feature in the current Rolling Stone -- "Bitter Pill," a lengthy narrative on the history of the controversial antipsychotic drug Zyprexa -- puts into perspective the spot-news stories I've read over the years about litigation over the drug...

Wrongful-conviction anecdotes add up to trend

Posted on January 29, 2009
Kevin Johnson put a fresh twist on coverage of wrongful convictions in this enterprising story yesterday in USA Today. Citing Innocence Project stats on inmates exonerated by DNA evidence -- showing that 90 percent were convicted of sex crimes -- Johnson explores how the sex-crime stigma follows these men long afterward...

Barnes in the live-chat hot seat

Posted on January 28, 2009
The Washington Post's Robert Barnes took questions yesterday at the paper's Web site, juggling a mix of politics and Supreme Court questions -- much as he does in his work for the paper (Barnes took leave from the Court beat last year to cover the campaign)...

Joy Behar and the decline of civilization

Posted on January 27, 2009
When the Rod Blagojevich publicity circus pitched its tent on ABC's The View yesterday, only a fool would have expected real journalism to occur. Still, by the account of the Chicago Tribune's Rick Pearson and Frank James, the venerable interviewer Barbara Walters -- appearing remotely from the West Coast -- did her best to lend some facts and professionalism to the affair...

WaPo hypes Gitmo story to give it news peg

Posted on January 25, 2009
This story in today's Washington Post by Karen DeYoung and Peter Finn has a superficial, he-said/she-said balance that at first makes the story seem like real news. Officials from the Obama administration say that they are just now realizing what a mess the government's records on Guantanamo detainees are...

Updates on live-blogging of trials

Posted on January 23, 2009
I wanted to make note of a flurry of reports and comments on live-blogging of trials:The ABA Journal's Debra Cassens Weiss wrote this informative, link-filled story focusing on an Iowa fraud prosecution that Trish Mehaffey of the Cedar Rapids Gazette covered from the courtroom on this blog...

Detroit dustup: where's the folo?

Posted on January 22, 2009
It's been nearly a week since Detroit's top municipal lawyer was forced out of her job in a dispute with a judge. The city's corporation counsel, Kathleen Leavey, denies she was making a racist comment when she called one of the city's courts a "ghetto court...

Prescription for medical-legal story: more sources

Posted on January 21, 2009
Dirk Johnson has this interesting and informative story today in the Times about a criminal case in Wisconsin that examines where the line is between religious freedom and criminal mistreatment of ill children. He clearly explains the issues and provides useful context about controversies over parents' religiously motivated refusals to get the necessary care for their children...

A civil rights history reading list for 1/20/09

Posted on January 20, 2009
To mark today's historic inauguration, LawBeat recommends the books that taught him the civil rights history of America -- and the central importance of both the rule of law and public knowledge of its government's behavior. Today, we give thanks to the journalists and historians whose inquiries and writings make today's milestone that much more powerful:Taylor Branch's three-part history of "America In the King Years": Parting the Waters, Pillar of Fire, At Canaan's EdgeRichard Kluger, Simple Justice: The History of Brown v...

Localize this: crack sentence reductions stats

Posted on January 19, 2009
Why isn't every local federal courts reporter doing what The Birmingham News' Robert Gordon did in this Sunday story? Using stats provided by the U.S. Sentencing Commission, Gordon compared Alabama to the other states in the 11th Circuit to show how common it is for its inmates to see their sentences reduced when they challenge their crack-cocaine prison terms...

Glaberson pens another Gitmo pattern piece

Posted on January 19, 2009
William Glaberson continues his impressive beat coverage of Guantanamo detainees, this time in a front-pager that's a synthesis of the many snapshots that he and other members of the press have taken in recent weeks. The bigger picture that emerges from Glaberson's notebooks shows how extensively the remaining ranks of detainees are riddled with cases that don't hold up to scrutiny, now that courts and military commissions are reviewing the cases...

Did Plain Dealer betray its reporter?

Posted on January 19, 2009
An unhappy ending to a series I praised last fall: As reported by Columbia Journalism Review in its January/February issue (no link yet available), the Cleveland Plain Dealer earned a CJR dart for "failure to aggressively back its reporter," Bob Paynter...

Retailers panic while consumer reporters snooze

Posted on January 18, 2009
Major newspapers have largely dropped the ball -- at least twice -- on an important piece of consumer and health news. Barely three weeks before a new law takes effect imposing strict safety and testing standards on products for children, handicraft makers and second-hand retailers are panicking over the law's broad -- and possibly unintended -- swipes at their businesses...

Closing Gitmo ain't easy? Who knew!

Posted on January 15, 2009
Now NPR has made a substantial contribution to a rapidly growing body of work that we might call "The Gitmo Puzzle: Harder Than We Thought!" It joins Newsweek, the Times, and practically everyone else, it seems, in reporting on the messy details of what it means to shut down the Guantanamo detention operation...

Boston federal court hearing to be webcast

Posted on January 15, 2009
Last summer, I blogged about a camera-friendly Boston federal judge, Nancy Gertner, who was considering a courtroom-camera experiment in her trial court -- dodging the federal camera ban, based on creative arguments made by Courtroom View Network and its Washington lawyer, cameras-in-the-courts veteran Jonathan Sherman...

Bush-Cheney legal legacy, in broad strokes

Posted on January 14, 2009
Warren Richey provides the second of three parts of a Christian Science Monitor series on "The Bush Legacy," this time focusing on the president's war-on-terror legal policies, particularly his -- or, rather, Vice President Cheney's -- efforts to enhance presidential power (the series' first part, yesterday, was a more general look at history's likely judgment, while tomorrow's looks at foreign policy)...

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