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Legal News

: Lawbeat

Where did all the laws go? A reporter explains.

By Mark Obbie

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WaPo's Jerry Markon has a smart folo on last week's Virginia Supreme Court ruling striking down a state law that punished e-mail spammers. Markon notices a pattern where the state passes aggressive, boundary-pushing legislation, and then gets slapped down by state or federal courts. Rather than indulge critics who focus only on the usual target -- activist courts -- he turns the political spotlight back on the policymakers, but without a scolding tone. It's just business in the policymaking world, they say:

... [L]egal experts pointed to the General Assembly's passage of a host of far-reaching laws regulating areas as diverse as gangs and state employees' access to sexually explicit Web sites along with spam and late-term abortions. Some of those measures, enacted or amended over the past decade, put Virginia at the forefront of national legal trends, exposing the commonwealth to challenges from a variety of activist groups.

While the story is short on named "legal expert" sources, it still does a good job in limited space, for a general audience, of explaining the dynamic among activist lawmakers, courts enforcing contemporary constitutional standards, and advocates challenging one side or the other. It's a lesson in real-world politics -- one that refreshingly avoids enflaming ideological wars with quotes by hand-wringing sources whose method of debate is to accuse the other side of bad faith.

Full post as published by Lawbeat on September 20, 2008 (boomark / email).