The Supreme Court's increasing attention to the decisions of foreign courts was criticized by Curtis Bradley in a July 7 Legal Times story. "Once you rely too heavily on foreign courts the question arises: Is the Court setting social policy, or is it interpreting our Constitution?" he asked. "When you pick out a couple of cases from foreign courts, how do you know you are getting a good sense of an international trend?" He noted as well that in some areas, such as freedom of speech, foreign courts are often far behind the U.S. high court's usually expansive understanding of the First Amendment. In the August 3 New York Times, he commented on the increasing use of American courts in settling disputes beyond the country's borders, emphasizing the diplomatic risks. "U.S. courts are a magnet for international litigation," he said. "But courts are not institutionally equipped to conduct foreign relations."

Rosa Ehrenreich Brooks was quoted in a July 10 Washington Post story about a federal court decision allowing a U.S. citizen captured with Taliban soldiers in Afghanistan to be jailed indefinitely without an attorney. "What is at issue is not whether the military has the authority on the battlefield to temporarily detain someone they believe to be a combatant. Nobody is questioning that," she said. "The question is, Can you then detain a U.S. citizen indefinitely without charge and without access to counsel once you have gotten him off the field of combat."

Jonathan Cannon was quoted in an August 29 New York Times article on the EPA's view that it does not have the legal authority to regulate emissions of carbon dioxide under the Clean Air Act. He noted that such heat-trapping gases could potentially be regulated if the agency found that they could reasonably be expected to harm human welfare, saying "The authority exists if the proper findings are made under the specific regulatory provisions of the act."

George Cohen was quoted in an August 4 Legal Times story on the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and new regulations governing lawyer conduct. Discussing a rule section requiring lawyers to report potential violations to a securities issuer's senior officers and board of directors, he said "It could be that the practicing bar is scared enough to act as if this is going to be enforceable. But when push comes to shove, what's going to happen when the SEC really tries to discipline someone under this? The main concern that we have is, is the rule going to do what we intended it to do, which is encourage up-the-ladder reporting?"

Anne Coughlin was quoted in several stories on the Muhammad/Malvo prosecution. In a July 3 Baltimore Sun article on change of venue in the Lee Boyd Malvo trial, she noted that the sense of fear people lived with during the shootings was a clear concern, especially in a case that is expected to be heavily scrutinized and appealed. In a July 15 Richmond Times-Dispatch story on the different theories advanced by prosecutors in the two cases, she noted that this was not an ethical issue but presented "practical problems. They want to present both juries with a consistent, coherent story." In the July 17 Times-Dispatch, Coughlin commented on logistical problems that might arise if the two trials overlap, and also discussed the prospects of selecting jurors who can put aside what they have heard about the cases. "We don't want jurors who never, ever look at the paper," she said. "We want thoughtful jurors." In the August 18 Roanoke Times & World News, Coughlin discussed the implementation of the Supreme Court's Lawrence decision in Virginia, where the legislature may be reluctant to rewrite a statute that currently makes no distinction between public and private sodomy. "Boy, does that put prosecutors and police departments in a ticklish situation," Coughlin said. "Should police departments and prosecutors be deciding what Lawrence means, and also what the Virginia legislature wants in light of Lawrence?"

Barry Cushman's scholarship on the New Deal Court was cited in two recent magazine articles. An article on Justice Anthony Kennedy in the July 10 National Review referred to his Rethinking the New Deal Court as "the best book" on the subject, and an article on conservative civil libertarians in the September American Prospect noted that Cushman's Virginia Law Review article explained that the famous "four horsemen" who opposed New Deal programs were actually pretty reliable defenders of free speech.

Micheal Dooley was quoted in a July 15 Toledo Blade article on a hostile takeover bid, in which a Michigan company incorporated a subsidiary in Virginia and then filed suit against the target Ohio company in Virginia circuit court. He explained that the arrangement was "standard operating procedure" typical of both takeovers and mergers.

John Harrison and John Jeffries both appeared on the July 3 NPR "Morning Edition" program to discuss the Supreme Court's latest term. Harrison discussed the influence of public opinion on the Court's affirmative action and sodomy decisions: "When a lot of the country and most of the elites have come to a position, the court often will then act against regional outliers, the point being that in some sense the court when it does that is kind of a majoritarian institution, acting on behalf of national majorities against local majorities or state-level majorities." Jeffries explained the difference between Justice Lewis Powell's influential decision in Bakke v. Regents of the University of California and his vote in Bowers v. Hardwick, saying that the justice came to the education question with a sure-footedness that he lacked on the gay rights issue: "He had been on the school board in Richmond, Virginia, and he had been on the State Board of Education and he had been on the governing boards of a public university and a private university. He knew a lot about higher education, and he felt some confidence of his views in that area. The area of homosexual relations was new to him and unfamiliar and I think he never came to rest in his own mind with the clarity and confidence that he did in the area of affirmative action."

Michael Klarman was quoted in a June 29 Philadelphia Inquirer story about the ways in which Supreme Court rulings reflect changes in society. Asked how the justices interpret the ambiguous words of the Constitution, he explained: "In an important sense, they make it up. Constitutional law reflects the values of the justices, and the justices tend to accept the prevailing social mores of their time." The article also quoted Klarman's explanation from his forthcoming book From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: "Constitutional law generally has sufficient flexibility to accommodate dominant public opinion, which the justices have little inclination, and limited power, to resist."

In an article in the July ABA Journal on the Supreme Court's Demore v. Kim decision limiting the rights of detained immigrants, David Martin noted that the Court sent contradictory signals on the rights of noncitizens. He noted that he expected cases to emerge concerning indefinite detention of immigrants caught up in the terrorism investigation. "Holding someone without charging them is the scariest prospect for civil liberties. I hope our law is such that that can't be done, even after Demore," he said. "It's fair to say that question hasn't been wholly resolved."

Jeffrey O'Connell was quoted in a July 4 Florida Times-Union story on legislative developments in medical malpractice. He noted a trend in state legislatures to focus on liability insurers, but said that putting the onus on the insurance industry to make reforms is a "red herring. No one has any idea what the risk is. I'm fascinated that the trial bar is second-guessing where insurance can raise their rates when there is an unpredictable tort system."

A July 4 San Luis Obispo Tribune article on First Amendment issues quoted from Robert O'Neil's article in the March 21 Chronicle of Higher Education on whether college professors' access to offensive sites on the Internet should be restricted. In a July 17 Associated Press story on an Ohio obscenity case involving a man imprisoned for writing fictitious stories of child torture and molestation, O'Neil noted that he "was just startled by the original development of the case, the notion that what are essentially thoughts or one's tortured imagination could become the basis for prosecution." O'Neil was also quoted in an August 13 Chicago Daily Law Bulletin story on the constitutionality of religious imagery in public art. Pointing out that the courtroom of the U.S. Supreme Court has artwork showing the Ten Commandments, but that Moses is portrayed among other "great lawgivers of history" such as Hammurabi and Muhammad, he stressed the importance of context in determining what is permissible. "I find the most helpful thing to determine what's legal," he said, "is to visualize it as a spectrum from the Alabama tablets to the U.S. Supreme Court."