Legal News

Biglaw's race to "reveal"

Posted on February 14, 2008
Law blogs and magazines are abuzz as major law firms voluntarily report their revenues and profits per partner. WSJ Law Blog's Ashby Jones rightly notes that the trend is remarkable, and he notes the lingering controversy as traditionalists hold onto their belief that disclosure is too crass for a Professional Firm...

Report stirs pro bono bar

Posted on February 14, 2008
A small-town newspaper's investigation of a possible wrongful conviction continues to yield results. I blogged last month about Christine Young's impressive report on murder convict Lebrew Jones in the Middletown, N.Y., Times Herald-Record. Jones is 19 years into a prison term for a New York City murder...

Steroids angle couldn't wait

Posted on February 13, 2008
The curse of the monthly magazine editor or writer is to see into the future, and know which stories will be fresh when they reach readers -- despite a lag time that's often weeks long between shipping the issue to the printer and its arrival in mailboxes...

Times dissembles about Berenson e-mail

Posted on February 11, 2008
The Alex Berenson email-scoop controversy just won't die. First was a report by Portfolio's Katherine Eban that Alex Berenson landed his scoop in the Times on Eli Lilly's settlement talks with the government by getting an e-mail accidentally. Then the Times slammed the story, claiming that the e-mail wasn't all that crucial after all...

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WaPo spanked on Gitmo story

Posted on February 11, 2008
Was the entire Washington Post staff at a retreat over the weekend? Or simply asleep? What else would explain why it failed to fight back after getting scooped on Saturday by William Glaberson's front-pager in the Times reporting that 9/11-conspiracy charges were imminent against half a dozen Guantanamo detainees...

Ambition and glitches in project on DNA and parole

Posted on February 09, 2008
It's a good thing for journalists that USA Today doesn't pay by the word. There's a double byline on this story. But assisting Kevin Johnson and Richard Willing were 27 contributors, 23 of them at other Gannett papers. And the word count? A brisk 428...

Scoop on Lilly scoop gets scooped

Posted on February 07, 2008
The Eli Lilly settlement-talks story just got weirder. When I first saw Katherine Eban's story at Portfolio.com on the making of this story by the Times' Alex Berenson -- Eban reported that "a pharmaceutical consultant" told her that a misdirected e-mail dropped the blockbuster story into Berenson's lap -- I didn't have anything profound to add to the discussion...

Abortion probe story has a hole

Posted on February 05, 2008
AP's Carl Manning is covering a Kansas story destined for national attention. It's on the touchiest of subjects -- abortion regulation, and late-term abortions in particular -- where politics and law are clashing in a criminal investigation. Manning's story is clear and factual, for the most part...

Questioning the DNA backlog

Posted on February 04, 2008
Barely a day goes by when someone, somewhere, isn't charged in a cold case or cleared of a wrongful conviction based on old biological evidence that's just now been run through a DNA database. Rarely do criminal justice journalists examine in general what governs the timing of matching or clearing DNA samples, and whether that system works efficiently...

David Cay Johnston, with passions in check

Posted on February 02, 2008
We might have every reason to suspect the Times' David Cay Johnston of biased reporting in his coverage of the Wesley Snipes tax-evasion trial in Florida. First, there's his previous book Perfectly Legal, the veteran tax reporter's slam against federal tax policy that lets the super-rich dodge their fair share...

NFL v. churches: a Super Bowl tradition

Posted on February 01, 2008
It's become as much an annual rite as the hype over Super Bowl TV commercials: the NFL's copyright stance against churches that hold Super Bowl parties and show the game on a big screen. All too often, such stories take the lazy route, painting the NFL as a bully acting arbitrarily and greedily, with no explanation of the law...

Another nail in the coffin of judicial openness

Posted on January 31, 2008
An unguarded comment by an Atlanta judge to The New Yorker's Jeffrey Toobin gets the judge booted from the prosecution of courthouse murder-spree defendant Brian Nichols. Superior Court Judge Hilton Fuller, whose controversial handling of the case had drawn national attention in the first place, was quoted by Toobin as saying this about Nichols' mental-health defense: "That's their only defense, because everyone in the world knows he did it...

Another "American Exceptions" installment

Posted on January 29, 2008
I was right about the timing of Adam Liptak's next "American Exceptions" dispatch. Today's is right on schedule, and a lamentably infrequent schedule it is. Still, it was worth the wait. Liptak's curiosity this time takes him to the weird world of bail bondsmen...

Capital punishment's price tag

Posted on January 28, 2008
Jeffrey Toobin's New Yorker feature on the Brian Nichols case breaks little new ground. But, for those of us outside Georgia who haven't followed every blip in the case, it serves as a thorough, thoughtful summary of a case that has ground to a halt over arguments concerning the state's financing of Nichols' defense...

Laws on photos in soft focus

Posted on January 25, 2008
The Orange County Register's Scott Reid and Dan Albano did admirable digging to tell this story on gay-porn Web sites that thrive on photographs surreptitiously made of young boys at swim and water-polo competitions. The photos of the boys in swim suits, caught sometimes in suggestive poses, are juxtaposed with explicit sex photos...

Left-right logic on Planet Whelan

Posted on January 24, 2008
So now I've entered Ed Whelan's orbit, or he mine. Just one response is needed: What in my postings about the Greenhouse controversy would lead one to believe I am a lefty? Evidently we can only be one thing: Enemies or Friends, Left or Right. I thought his attack on Greenhouse to be over the top -- not unfounded, as I said at the outset, just overblown -- so therefore I am not with him, I am against him...

Jena coverage, in three takes

Posted on January 24, 2008
Raquel Christie's analysis of media coverage of the Jena, La., incident wins points for the most words published so far on the topic. But that's about it. The story's a muddle. Throughout the first 3,000 words of the 7,000-word story, the message is as clear as it is outdated: The national media were slow to grasp a story of racial injustice...

Lay off Linda

Posted on January 22, 2008
OK, I was trying to be polite. Slate's Emily Bazelon and Dahlia Lithwick did a much more thorough job of putting Ed Whelan in his place. Meanwhile, Whelan has posted part 4 in his exclusive, 4,387-part series.

Greenhouse's "conflict," again and again and again

Posted on January 22, 2008
Ed Whelan at Bench Memos answers Clark Hoyt, the New York Times public editor who wrote on Sunday about Whelan's conflict-of-interest accusations against Linda Greenhouse. The answer is in three parts (so far), here, here, and here. Its third part conveniently indexes Whelan's dozen or so past posts on -- or, I should say, against -- Greenhouse's Supreme Court coverage...

Canary in a Cleveland coal mine

Posted on January 21, 2008
That wacky Congress! Rachel Dissell and Gabriel Baird of the Cleveland Plain Dealer document the early, and messy, fallout from one state's enactment of legislation to comply with the federal Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act. Their story serves as a map for others to localize the story of what's meant to be a nationwide crackdown on sexual predators...

Amicus filings and conflicts

Posted on January 20, 2008
New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt sides with Linda Greenhouse and Times editors in a dispute over an alleged conflict of interest. Hoyt articulates sensible policies, and takes a justified shot at Greenhouse's accuser. But what he doesn't articulate clearly enough is an ethics policy that responds directly the central questions posed by the complaint...

Texas indictment provides teaching moment

Posted on January 19, 2008
A state Supreme Court justice is indicted. The district attorney immediately dismisses the charge for lack of evidence. Grand jurors speak out, claiming the DA is playing politics. The grand jury could keep investigating -- or not -- and keep indicting...

Margolick to Portfolio's rescue

Posted on January 18, 2008
I've been one of Portfolio's happy charter subscribers (unlike the many commentators who mock the big Conde Nast business start-up). But one thing lacking has been prominent legal affairs stories. Now that may change, big time. The New York Observer's John Koblin reports that Vanity Fair's David Margolick is joining Portfolio as a contributing editor...

A 9-0 reversal? Sorry, my bad!

Posted on January 17, 2008
What a perfect example of the difference between judging and policy-making. The Supreme Court's decision yesterday in New York State Board of Elections v. Lopez Torres (pdf file) -- a challenge to New York's much-maligned system of electing trial judges -- neatly illustrates several points that I and my fellow teachers in this new course on law, politics and media were making yesterday in our first session...

A 19-year-old question produces results

Posted on January 17, 2008
Christine Young of the Middletown, N.Y., Times Herald-Record has produced an impressive investigation of a possible wrongful conviction. Her report -- told in an ambitious multimedia package from a team of editors and designers who are given full credit on the site -- focuses on claims of a false confession that put Lebrew Jones in prison for the 1987 murder of prostitute Micki Hall...

Can "The Wire" teach good journalism?

Posted on January 16, 2008
Watching my favorite show, HBO's "The Wire," has become far more than a one-hour weekly commitment, what with a non-stop yakfest among journalists over creator David Simon's depiction of his former newspaper home at the Baltimore Sun. It's a great sport -- neatly summarized today in the Washington Post by David Montgomery -- and helped in no small measure by journalists' endless fascination with themselves, and with Simon's pugilistic responses to perceived critical and personal slights...

In praise of resource pages

Posted on January 15, 2008
The excellent Sex Crimes Blog has started a resources page on this term's Supreme Court case on the death penalty for child-rape. Beyond the pleadings in the case, it's a rich archive of the blog's previous posts (which in turn link to news stories). A variety of sites already do a good job of tracking the Supreme Court's docket...

Hometown advantage in l'affaire Scruggs

Posted on January 15, 2008
Readers of the dead-tree version of The Wall Street Journal learned today (subscription required, for now) that the judicial-bribery investigation centered on Mississippi plaintiffs' lawyer Dickie Scruggs has widened. Citing a plea agreement unsealed in court documents yesterday, Ashby Jones lays out the basic facts: Lawyer Joey Langston has admitted to a role in an alleged conspiracy to funnel money and a federal judgeship to Hinds County Circuit Judge Bobby DeLaughter to rig a ruling on attorneys' fees favoring the already-wildly-rich Scruggs...

BusinessWeek's new DC legal writer

Posted on January 11, 2008
BusinessWeek has filled a long-vacant position in DC with Douglas McCollam, most recently a senior editor at Legal Times. McCollam, an American Lawyer veteran, helped run Legal Times in the interim between Jim Oliphant and new editor David Brown. A former practicing lawyer in his native New Orleans, McCollam also has written frequently for Columbia Journalism Review...

Lewis to leave Columbia

Posted on January 11, 2008
Tony Lewis, one of the legends of legal reporting, is leaving the faculty of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism at the end of 2008. Dean Nick Lemann mentioned this on Wednesday at a meeting of the schools in the Carnegie-Knight Initiative on the Future of Journalism Education (Syracuse being one of them, in part because of Carnegie's funding of my legal reporting program)...

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