Amid Antiterror Focus,
Prosecutions Decline;
Rep. Lewis Probe Slowed

The book offers more than 400 footnotes, but Draper does not make clear the sourcing for some of the more arresting assertions -- such as the one about Roberts's role in the Miers nomination, which has previously not come to light.

"The account is not true," said Supreme Court spokeswoman Kathy Arberg, after consulting with Roberts. "The chief justice did not suggest Harriet Miers to the president."

a rare look at a side of fashion that exists parallel to Seventh Avenue’s celebrity designers, though all but unknown to the public. Interviews with executives at a number of companies that specialize in designing for the private labels of department stores and other chains reveal a highly competitive network of factories, which use the latest technology to reproduce designer looks with the impunity and speed of Robin Hood. Their copies do not violate existing law.

The cut or details of a garment cannot be copyrighted under existing law, although logos and original prints can be protected.

I think it’s going to be an amazing time to tackle legal journalism in Washington. Legal Times is going to be covering the election, a new administration, a court with a close ideological divide, and, naturally, the most powerful collection of lawyers on Earth [editor's note: other than on Wall Street!]. For a legal news and political junkie like me, that’s the recipe for a dream job.

only had to manage a few hundred employees and expenditures in the tens of millions of dollars. The U.S. Department of Justice counts more than 100,000 employees and an annual budget in excess of $22 billion. This is arguably like appointing a small business owner, albeit a highly accomplished one, to run a Fortune 500 company.

before I'm comfortable allowing the justices to go around on the speaking circuit, I'd like them to do their job, which is to select and then decide the cases handed to them through the system. They are supposed to clarify ambiguous legal doctrines, offer certainty to businesses and individuals alike, and, most importantly, act as a check upon the excesses of the other two branches. And, on this score, their most fundamental task, the justices aren't up to snuff. They are all hooky and no school, all go and no show, too much sizzle and not enough steak.

The first wave of book reviews is full of sniping about that very question. And if you read them together as an oeuvre, you quickly discover that everyone seems to know exactly what's wrong with Supreme Court reporting. They just all have a different idea about who's to blame. And—surprise!—everyone seems to think that what the court beat needs more of is, well, people like them.

Toobin calls relations between the justices “cordial” but, frustratingly, offers only a few elaborations. How Ginsburg and O’Connor, the court’s first two women, got along surely warrants more than a sentence or two. Why were O’Connor and Stevens the only colleagues the dying Rehnquist allowed into his home? And who most regularly persuades whom (if, on such a factionalized court, there’s any persuasion going on at all)? Can it be true, as Greenburg has written, that at least initially it was not Scalia who influenced Thomas, but the other way around?

“He [Orwell] is a particular idol of mine for his clear writing and complete disdain for cant,” Judge Mukasey told a reporter for The Financial Times in 1989, not long after becoming a judge. “I try to recognize when some spongy abstraction is trying to cover up an excuse for thought or analysis.”

"The discrepancy between the alleged number of victims per year and the number of cases they've been able to make is so huge that it's got to raise major questions," Weitzer said. "It suggests that this problem is being blown way out of proportion."

On the issue of sources, the writer, Peter Landesman, conducted more than 45 interviews, including many with high-ranking federal officials, law enforcement officers and representatives of human rights organizations. Four sources insisted on anonymity to protect their professional positions. A magazine fact checker also interviewed all relevant sources, many of them both before and after publication. Some readers have questioned the figure of 10,000 enforced prostitutes brought into this country each year. The source of that number is Kevin Bales, recommended to the magazine by Human Rights Watch as the best authority on the extent of enforced prostitution in the United States, who based his estimates on State Department documents, arrest and prosecution records and information from nearly 50 social service agencies.

Although there have been several estimates over the years, the number that helped fuel the congressional response -- 50,000 victims a year -- was an unscientific estimate by a CIA analyst who relied mainly on clippings from foreign newspapers, according to government sources who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the agency's methods.