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Saturday, August 19, 2006

Law - Many law bloggers quoted as experts in NYT front-page story

"Experts Fault Reasoning in Surveillance Decision" is the headline to a front-page story in today's NY Times. The story is below the fold, but Howard Bashman's first quotes are on the front-page, as are those of Yale law professor Jack Balkin. The story is about reaction to federal Judge Anna Diggs Taylor's ruling Thursday. Some quotes:

Even legal experts who agreed with a federal judge’s conclusion on Thursday that a National Security Agency surveillance program is unlawful were distancing themselves from the decision’s reasoning and rhetoric yesterday.

They said the opinion overlooked important precedents, failed to engage the government’s major arguments, used circular reasoning, substituted passion for analysis and did not even offer the best reasons for its own conclusions.

Discomfort with the quality of the decision is almost universal, said Howard J. Bashman, a Pennsylvania lawyer whose Web log provides comprehensive and nonpartisan reports on legal developments.

“It does appear,” Mr. Bashman said, “that folks on all sides of the spectrum, both those who support it and those who oppose it, say the decision is not strongly grounded in legal authority.”

The main problems, scholars sympathetic to the decision’s bottom line said, is that the judge, Anna Diggs Taylor, relied on novel and questionable constitutional arguments when more straightforward statutory ones were available.

She ruled, for instance, that the program, which eavesdrops without court permission on international communications of people in the United States, violated the First Amendment because it might have chilled the speech of people who feared they might have been monitored.

That ruling is “rather innovative” and “not a particularly good argument,” Jack Balkin, a law professor at Yale who believes the program is illegal, wrote on his Web log.

A number of other law blogger experts are quoted on the jump page.

A few month ago, The Beckman Center for Internet Law and Society at Harvard University sponsored a seminar titled "Bloggership: How Blogs Are Transforming Legal Scholarship." Here is the agenda.

Via this page, you can access all of the papers from the conference, plus download mp3s of the audio of the full-day conference.

The theme of the conference was:

Web logs ("blogs") are transforming much of American society, including government, politics, journalism, and business. In the past few years, blogs have begun to affect the delivery of legal education, the production and dissemination of legal scholarship, and the practice of law. We are delighted that over twenty of the nation’s leading law professor bloggers have agreed to join with us for the first scholarly conference on the impact of blogs on the legal academy.
Examples such as today's NY Times story appear to make the point.

Posted by Marcia Oddi on August 19, 2006 09:37 AM
Posted to General Law Related