Everyone covers Chief Justice John Roberts' year-end report and its call for judicial pay raises. But Lyle Denniston's story on SCOTUSblog ends with this scolding note:

The Supreme Court, in issuing the Chief Justice's year-end report, had specified that the report was not to be released publicly until 12:01 a.m. Tuesday. The Washington Post's website, however, broke that embargo well over an hour before the release time, and this has been picked up on the Internet. This blog felt that it could no longer observe the release time, and thus this report has appeared about 20 minutes early.

Denniston's post is stamped at 11:45 p.m. I'm not sure what's more remarkable: Denniston's sense of honor -- bordering on fastidiousness -- that forces him to disclose why he is breaking an embargo by 16 minutes, or that he's checking on his competitors and tapping out a blog post just before the ball drops in Times Square.

Jan Crawford Greenburg does it again, landing an interview with a Supreme Court justice -- this time John Paul Stevens -- that ABC heavily touts as a "Nightline exclusive" and Stevens' "first network TV interview." Turns out that's about the most interesting thing that can be said for the skimpy, three-minute series of conversation snippets in which Stevens remembered Gerald Ford fondly if blandly. The online video is even less complete, and features a couple of quotes not shown on TV. Crawford's online story text has a bit more substance, at least.

So much for ABC's hype machine (which Howard Bashman helpfully revealed in this post, where a producer touted a 20-minute interview with the justice). Maybe the unaired 17 minutes were more interesting.

All the coverage today of the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist's FBI files serves as a reminder of a standard reporting and research technique using the Freedom of Information Act. Tony Mauro of Legal Times describes it best after telling what the papers reveal about Rehnquist's withdrawal from prescription painkillers:

These and other nuggets of information are contained in the 1,561 pages of Rehnquist's file, which the FBI released to researchers and others including Legal Times last week in response to Freedom of Information Act requests filed after he died in September 2005. The Privacy Act bars public disclosure of such files during a person's lifetime. But that protection falls away after death, and it has become common for researchers to seek the files after a famous person dies as a window into the FBI's practices.

Mauro doesn't explain why the Rehnquist file was just disclosed, 16 months after the chief justice's death. But it's standard for an agency to take lots of time to locate and review requested files before releasing them.

Michael Orey's cover story in BusinessWeek echoes this American Lawyer story that I blogged about here. Classily, Orey even credits the earlier story, but finds a way to break new ground:

The American Lawyer, an influential trade publication, recently declared an end to the era of mass-injury class actions, but the changes are far broader than that. Courthouse doors have slammed shut on a wide variety of claims. Michigan, for example, has virtually wiped out all lawsuits against drugmakers in the state. Six states have passed laws seriously restricting the kinds of asbestos suits that can be filed, and 23 now have statutes saying you can't sue the likes of McDonald's for making you fat. Damage limits in many states have rendered medical malpractice litigation nearly comatose. Both federal and state courts are reinforcing the trend. In December a U.S. appeals court in New York nixed a class action accusing investment firms of manipulating the price of initial public offerings. That was a big loss for securities fraud plaintiffs' lawyers, especially in a year when the total number of shareholder suits filed was about half the level of prior years, according to statistics compiled by Stanford Law School. In 2005 the Illinois Supreme Court struck down a $10.1 billion judgment against Philip Morris, saying a state law protects the company from suits alleging that its marketing of "light" cigarettes was deceptive. It all adds up to an extraordinary turnabout for the plaintiffs' bar....

It's interesting that Orey focuses more on the trend's impact on the practice of law, while Alison Frankel in The American Lawyer -- a magazine for lawyers, a narrower audience than Orey's -- took the broader tack.

Part of me wants to praise the Times and reporter Anemona Hartocollis for boldly fronting a story that is totally lacking in traditional news value -- a story that explains the legal world to laymen in an entertaining way. After all, this is an "everyone knows" story. Everyone knows that the criminal justice system thrives on suspects' idiodic decisions to explain and confess. Everyone, that is, except readers who don't know much about the law. So the story could serve a useful purpose in examining a truth that's sitting right in front of us.

But then I lost my impulse to praise the unconventional, given the writer's gag-inducing reliance on lame literary references and analogies that read like a bad crime novel. To wit:

For many people, the urge to explain, if not to confess, is as urgent as it was for Raskolnikov in “Crime and Punishment.”

“My name is Paul Cortez,” is the Melvillian first sentence...

... roller coaster ride of love, sex and betrayal...

...Hamlet-like moments...

...an almost Gallic appreciation for women...

Ick.

Malcolm Gladwell follows up his defense of Enron in The New Yorker this week (he calls it a "semi-defense") with this challenge on his blog:

Can anyone explain—in plain language—what it is Jeff Skilling and Co. did wrong? ... The question is strictly a legal one: according to the way the accounting rules were written at the time, what specific transgressions were Skilling guilty of that merited twenty-four years in prison? For the sake of argument, let’s stipulate that summaries must be three sentences or less.

New Yorker Times business columnist Joe Nocera obliges Gladwell (but ignores the three-sentence rule) in this fiery, evidence-packed dismantling of Gladwell's thesis (subscription required). In the process, Nocera -- who, at Fortune and later the Times, has covered or edited coverage of the Enron scandal since it occurred -- elicits a remarkable disclaimer by Gladwell. Nocera writes:

When I called Mr. Gladwell a few days ago, he backpedaled from his “semi-defense” position. “I wasn’t interested in exonerating Enron,” he told me. “I was interested in the kind of question it represented. I didn’t go into the legal case because I didn’t understand the legal case. What I wanted to see was what investors reasonably could have known about the company prior to it falling apart. On that question, the investment community bears equal culpability to make sense of inherently complex environments.”

Wow. That's a useful way of shrugging off responsibility for botched facts when cornered by someone who knows more. Looks like Gladwell reached his own tipping point.

We here at LawBeat obviously believe in making better beat reporters. So it's not surprising that I think my friend Ed Wasserman overreacts when he says that the antidote to the "corrupting" influence of beat reportering is to run newsrooms without beats. Not that he doesn't make some good points. Anyone who's worked in a newsroom knows a suck-up beat reporter or two or three, the ones who use puff pieces to curry favor or who look the other way in hopes of getting a handout -- or even a PR job -- later on.

But my experience in a variety of newsrooms -- small town, big city, and trade publications -- tells me that Wasserman's solution is no solution at all, especially on a hard-to-master beat like courts and law. The experience and contacts you gain on a beat not only earn you favors and access, they make you less gullible. You have the context you need to avoid being spun, or avoid getting basic things wrong. Nothing made me happier than to see a worthy competitor go on vacation. Then I knew I could beat her temporary replacement without breaking a sweat. And I could see the sources on the beat blow off the temp, because they didn't know if they could trust him to get it right -- not because they couldn't manipulate him.

Does familiarity breed discomfort? Sure. I'll always remember -- and sometimes relish memories of -- the cops and prosecutors and defense lawyers and judges who couldn't believe I hadn't bought their line. Or the mayor's flack who treated me like the enemy and tried to get me reassigned or humiliated by the scoops she fed my suck-up competitor. They always ended up cooperating later, or being easily worked around if they couldn't get over their failure to control me. I certainly wasn't the lone brave beat reporter in this regard. And I definitely don't want to get my news from a bunch of newbies. So to Wasserman I say: No sale!

Slate and the Los Angeles Times' Jim Newton score a legal-history scoop with the surprise announcement that Newton has had access to -- and now is revealing -- a remarkable trove of the late Justice William Brennan's private papers. Slate is running the report in three parts. Newtwon starts out by explaining Brennan's influence over the Warren Court's liberal precedents, explaining how Brennan protected them in the Burger years and putting that influence in a current context:

... [O]ne factor stood above all others in those years: the subtle, effective leadership of Justice William J. Brennan Jr., who guided the court's dwindling liberal bloc to influence well beyond its votes and solidified the work of the Warren Court into a set of accepted norms of American life. The story of Brennan's work helps explain why conservatives still feel that despite Republican domination of today's court (seven of its nine members were appointed by Republican presidents), their cause does yet not prevail there, and why the appointment of Harriet Miers so enraged them. It illustrates why the nomination of Samuel Alito was so tensely contested and why the court's current term is being closely watched for signs that the break back to the right may at last be at hand.

What's notable about this, beyond the actual substance of the reports, is that the revealed papers come from someone other than Stephen Wermiel, Brennan's official biographer. Wermiel, an American University law professor and former Supreme Court reporter for The Wall Street Journal and Boston Globe, has had what was thought to be exclusive access to all of Brennan's papers and has worked on the biography for a decade. His critics have wondered when he'll finally hit the send key. Until he does, Brennan's papers evidently will continue to dribble out.

Part 2 of the William Brennan memos ends with a fascinating legal-journalism tidbit (yes, we have tunnel vision, but we're sticking with our mission here at LawBeat). Jim Newton recounts Brennan's version of the Supreme Court's internal politicking over the Watergate tapes, in a decision that cost Richard Nixon the presidency and hinged on divisions among the justices over strategy and legal reasoning, Then, he continues:

After stories appeared in the press hinting at the divisions within the court over the opinion, [Chief Justice Warren] Burger circulated a memo, typical in its prickly exasperation and in its odd use of quotation marks around meaningless phrases. "We are all hardened to the nonsense peddled as 'inside information' by some reporters," Burger wrote and Brennan recorded, "and with our 'vows of silence' there is nothing we can do about it. All of us know that from the day of our Conference on July 10 we were in accord on every major point and that our only differences (and few they were) related to semantics and detail, not substance." Brennan memorialized that with undisguised bemusement: "The reader of this history must decide for himself whether he shares the opinion of the Chief Justice ? ."

Great stuff. Reporters 1, Burger 0.

The Washington Post's Alan Sipress reports that bloggers will get two of the 100 seats set aside for reporters at the start next week of Lewis "Scooter" Libby's trial in Washington, D.C., federal court. Sipress quotes Robert Cox of the Media Bloggers Association extensively, but no source is cited for the claim that the Libby trial marks the first time bloggers will have reserved media seats at a federal trial. The claim is dubious. At the Enron trial of Jeff Skilling and Ken Lay last year, for example, the Houston Chronicle team included multiple bloggers -- some on staff, some not, and some with seats in the court or in an overflow room for the media with closed-circuit video. Maybe Sipress meant to say it's a first for bloggers unaffiliated with a mainstream media outlet to get reserved seats in the courtroom (and I don't know if even that's true, but it stands a better chance of proving true than what he wrote).

The story doesn't look much at whether blogging a trial is the same as covering it for a newspaper or magazine or broadcast outlet. Mostly it's a rehash of a tired debate -- are bloggers real journalists? -- and then veers weirdly into the legal risks that bloggers face as publishers and how they wrestle with upgrading their professional standards. Focus, people, focus! Back to the point about blogger access to a major trial, it will be interesting to see how bloggers doing original reporting handle the story. We'll be watching -- and hoping that readers will point us toward notable blogger coverage of the Libby trial.

By the way, isn't the name Media Bloggers Association redundant? Bloggers are media. Unless it means they blog about the media. Maybe LawBeat should join!

I'm a fan of Jeffrey Rosen's smart legal reporting and essays. But he doesn't do his readers any favors in this piece (subscription required), which has no clear point at the top -- except that last July he interviewed Chief Justice John Roberts for the January/February issue of The Atlantic. He then proceeds for 5,600 words to meander through their conversation, focusing almost exclusively on Roberts' standard theme of unifying his contentious colleagues through calm consensus rather than excited, ideological warfare. Despite challenging even The Atlantic's elite readership to care enough to follow along, the piece does contain some nuggets:

“If the Court in [John] Marshall’s era had issued decisions in important cases the way this Court has over the past thirty years, we would not have a Supreme Court today of the sort that we have,” he said. “That suggests that what the Court’s been doing over the past thirty years has been eroding, to some extent, the capital that Marshall built up.” Roberts added, “I think the Court is also ripe for a similar refocus on functioning as an institution, because if it doesn’t it’s going to lose its credibility and legitimacy as an institution.” In particular, Roberts declared, he would make it his priority, as Marshall did, to discourage his colleagues from issuing separate opinions.

***

Despite his concern about separate opinions, Roberts was proud of his relative success in encouraging unanimity, especially in less visible cases. He seemed especially frustrated, therefore, by the media’s focus on the number of high-profile 5—4 decisions and the shifting coalitions that had determined them. “There was a question from one of these [tour] groups that come in here: ‘How do you decide who’s going to be the swing vote?’” Roberts laughed and shook his head. “I don’t know, we rotate. That has to undermine—that’s a steady wasting away of the notion of the rule of law, a personalization of it.”

***

His colleagues “are concerned about having new justices on the Court,” he said, and “don’t want the Court to seem to be lurching around because of changes in personnel.” And he felt that his success in achieving an unusually high number of unanimous opinions was due to the other justices’ eagerness to be helpful to a newcomer, much like a fiancé meeting his in-laws for the first time at Thanksgiving. “I do think people were being particularly helpful and accommodating in the first term,” he said. “Maybe they won’t feel the same way the second. We’ll see.”

Rosen makes no attempt to hide his view, which translates essentially to this: Roberts will achieve greatness if he turns out to be a moderate who respects liberal precedents. To quote Roberts, "We'll see."

The Joseph McCarthy award for smear tactics goes this week to Cully Stimson, deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs, whose frothing attack on law firms that represent Guantanamo Bay detainees turned into the big news that he predicted it would be -- but not quite the way Stimson expected. In an interview with Mike Causey and Jane Norris on Federal News Radio's "Federal Drive" show, Stimson -- with no prompting -- started talking about the firms that ought to lose corporate business for "representing the very terrorists who hit" the bottom lines of the law firms' corporate clients. He then proceeds to tick off the names of 14 Am Law 100 firms (adding "and all the rest of them") and hints darkly at whether they are paid by the forces of evil rather than doing the work pro bono.

So far big law firms have kept quiet. The story started small, with a Washington Post editorial yesterday. Today the Times plays the story above the fold, clearly indicating a feeding frenzy has commenced.

The major papers perform the usual pretrial ritual for Lewis "Scooter" Libby, publishing a curtain-raiser the day before jury selection begins. Here's the Times' version and the Post's. Weirdly, the LA Times sits it out. Maybe the Curtain Raiser Department has MLK Day off. USA Today's Bill Nichols makes the most interesting point in his version. Here's how he starts:

The perjury and obstruction trial of former White House aide Lewis "Scooter" Libby opens Tuesday amid diminished expectations for bombshells from a case that once dominated Washington headlines.

Save for the expected testimony of Vice President Cheney — a first for a sitting vice president in a criminal case, according to presidential historians — the case against Cheney's former chief of staff has lost some of its appeal. "It's going to disappear into the back pages of the newspaper, with the front pages devoted to Bush's new buildup in Iraq," says Paul Light, a presidential historian at New York University.

Normally a "no news here" lede and nut can frighten readers away, but this one works because it lends useful perspective to a story that is otherwise a rehash. Plus, I think he's right.

Update, Jan. 16: The LA Times' Richard Schmitt weighs in with this thorough overview.

No byline says "blockbuster trial" more than the Associated Press' Linda Deutsch's. NPR's Michele Norris interviewed the LA-based AP veteran courthouse reporter today, to mark Deutsch's 40 years on the law beat (thanks to How Appealing for the tip).

We listen to her reminisce about the Manson trial ("Charlie," to Deutsch), the Angela Davis trial, the Rodney King trial, O.J. Simpson -- as the law played host to America's struggles over Vietnam, race, celebrity, and that basest of human activities, murder. "I always say that trials mirror history, that if you wanted to know what was going on in America at a specific time, you needed to walk into a courtroom and look around and listen to what was happening," Deutsch tells Norris. She adds later in the seven-plus-minute segment, "No other beat offers this kind of access to human emotion. You get at the heart of what people are about." Amen.

Deutsch is still on the beat. Next up, reports Norris: probably the Phil Spector murder trial, another LA freak show -- handled as always by a true pro for the AP.

The Times has a way-cool interactive graphic on all things Libby-trial related. You can mix and match the way you look at timelines and archived stories, by type of development or a particular player in the drama. This kind of tool isn't unique to the Libby trial, or the Times, but for folks trying to keep straight who's who in this case -- such as, ahem, my students (hint hint) -- this makes that backgrounding more fun.

PS -- Sorry to be so Times-obsessed lately. These things go in phases.

I've been, I'll admit, a little grumpy about all the hoo-hah made over bloggers covering the trial of Lewis "Scooter" Libby. The Media Bloggers Association's Robert Cox has been in self-promotion overdrive, duping a remarkable array of reporters into repeating his BS about how it's a first -- all thanks to Cox -- that bloggers were granted credentials to cover the trial. Not true, as we reported (to no evident effect). On top of that, Cox's own posts from the trial have been supremely lame. News flash: On Thursday, he "slipped out for lunch with Alan Sipress from the Washington Post, the reporter who wrote the story last week that go so much attention [for Cox and his Big Lie]. We went to Rasika, a terrific nouvelle-Indian restaurant...." On Tuesday, Cox "boarded a DC-bound Amtrak train this morning and arrived at Union Station around lunchtime. Waiting for me was a producer for ABC News who was there to shoot video of my arrival - getting through the train station, walking past the Capitol Building, making my way over to the U.S. District Court in Washington and - perhaps most importantly - dropping off my luggage at a hotel."

Oy.

So I rose this morning, sharpening my blade and readying a rant on how this was turning into a wasted opportunity. About how access should yield vignettes and insights and FACTS that wouldn't surface if these blogger-reporters were just sitting at home. Blogging doesn't have to look like Times and Post and AP stories. It should fit its medium. But it should be reporting -- like this and this and this and this, from behind the scenes or in the courtroom, though not necessarily written in the same journalistic style -- not just Cox-style blah-blah, which is plain amateurish.

But when I had more time to look around this morning, I discovered this page that Cox set up to collect the reporting that his recruited bloggers have done so far. And it's good! It's different, to be sure, from the mainstream reports. Some of it doesn't follow the traditions of neutrality (one blogger talks about his pending ethics complaint against prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald) that we traditionalists treasure. But the variety and color and detail is a welcome supplement to the standard this-happened-in-court-today report. Cox has done a good job of herding this colorful crew into court and making its material more visible to the world. I still prefer a straightforward story that puts all the background and latest news in one place, but I also appreciate the variety of perspectives that blogging offers.

So now I'll lay off Cox -- if he'll stop bragging about his non-precedent precedent and his restaurant recommendations.

ABC's Jan Crawford Greenburg is no slouch in the book-flogging department. Her new book, Supreme Conflict: The Inside Story of the Struggle for Control of the United States Supreme Court (Penguin Press), arrives in stores on Tuesday. She launched a blog, Legalities, yesterday. So far it's little more than book promo, but we have reason to hope that she'll turn it into a sustainable, readable source of legal news. And then there's this well-written narrative in the Sunday Outlook section of the Post, drawn from -- yes, that's right -- the book. Here's the money shot:

The departures of [Sandra Day] O'Connor and [William] Rehnquist produced a titanic conflict over their successors, one that turned allies into enemies, damaged reputations and reopened old wounds. Yet, after bizarre missteps and strategic brilliance at the highest levels, [President] Bush engineered lasting change in the court, succeeding where past Republican presidents -- including his own father -- had failed. And in so doing, he provided some redemption for the conservative movement, so dismayed by watching Republicans in the political branches flout ethics laws, expand government and indulge in runaway spending. If nothing else, they would get their court.

Greenburg is scheduled to appear tomorrow on ABC's "This Week with George Stephanopoulos." Monday it's "Good Morning America" and a segment on "Nightline." It's quite the rollout -- and good to see a heavily promoted, popular account of the Court and appointment politics. A bit intimidating, too, to those of us who struggle to find time to even read a book.

It's not exactly news that lawyers and their firms are in the publishing business and the seminar business and other forms of creating content: legal news and analysis. They've been putting their intelligence into newsletters and seminars and books for generations, mainly to promote their legal services.

It's also not new that this impulse to give away some legal intelligence works especially well in law blogs. There are a zillion of 'em out there, from small firms and large, professors and paralegals, harvesting others' news reports or writing original reports and analyses. There are so many -- on so many legal topics -- that we're long past the era when anyone could keep up with it all.

But I still find it remarkable when I stumble across something like this: Womble Carlyle's mixed use development blog. Why, you wonder, would I care about the law of real estate development in the southeast? One word: jobs. Well, two words: journalism jobs.

This blog is written by Jonathan Groner, an experienced legal journalist, formerly of Legal Times. He works as "senior communications counsel" at the law firm. The postings he's reporting and writing look to me a lot like smart law and business writing -- albeit in a very narrow niche. His firm has eight blogs, some more active than others. It may be ahead of most other big firms in this endeavor, but knowing big firms as I do, the others can't be far behind.

Think of the potential. We in the media business are conditioned to be dependent on advertising and, if we're exceedingly lucky, subscriptions. Here we have an entirely different model staring us in the face: a business that can give away premium information because that information promotes a different but lucrative revenue stream.

Even someone with far less experienced than Groner, and lacking his legal background, should take heart. In a world where the Times Mirrors and Time Warners are axing journalists and selling off assets, and where local newspapers have all but abandoned business coverage (among other beats), there is hope that what journalists do will be prized and paid for by someone. It ain't quite as sexy as covering Britney or the NBA. And it's not pure and independent of PR (though the stuff I'm seeing seems pretty straightforward). But it requires a brain and reporting and writing talent. And it's a job.

• Christopher Beam's "Who Owns the Unabomber's Writings?" on a prisoner's loss of rights, and whether copyright controls the government's sale of original documents over the writer's objection. When I criticized the Times' story on Monday for raising but not explaining Ted Kaczynski's First Amendment claims, another question lurking in the background was: What about copyright? Beam's Explainer explains it well.

• Torie Bosch's "Is Dakota Fanning in Kiddie Porn?" on whether the makers of the film Hounddog could have broken the law in depicting the rape (fictional, of course) of a 12-year-old. Other recent stories have put a spotlight on complaints and threats, but with little clear explanation of what the law would require. Bosch's Explainer fills that gap.