In a July 20 New York Times story about a Colorado Supreme Court decision prohibiting the publication of information about the accuser in Kobe Bryant's sexual assault case, even though it had already been released by mistake, Vincent Blasi said that the decision upholding prior restraint was at odds with U.S. Supreme Court cases concluding that the news media cannot be restrained from publishing publicly available information. ''The majority's effort seems pretty strained,'' he said. ''If the U.S. Supreme Court were to get this case and affirm, that would alter, I think, how other lower courts would read this body of precedent.''

Richard Bonnie was quoted in an August 30 Myrtle Beach Sun Times story about jury selection in a capital murder case in South Carolina federal court. An accomplice had already pleaded guilty to carjacking and kidnapping, and a jury sentenced him to death in June. The second defendant had not yet entered a plea in the case. "It's unusual for a person to plead guilty in a death penalty case," he noted.

George Cohen was quoted in two related stories on lawyers' liability for securities fraud in the July American Lawyer. In one story, he urged lawyers to resist trying to shift responsibility to accountants. "It is the lawyers' obligation to advise their clients about whether this transaction is legal or not," he said. "The fact that an accounting firm says, 'We can characterize [the deal] in this way' does not answer the question: Is this fraudulent? Is this deal designed to mislead investors?" In the other story, Cohen discussed a 1994 Supreme Court decision which made it more difficult to sue law firms by holding that there is no cause of action for aiding and abetting securities fraud. A 2002 District Court decision, however, allowed a fraud action against a law firm involved in the Enron scandal to proceed and provided a more expansive view of who qualifies as a primary actor. The judge, as Cohen explained, "said, 'If you are an attorney who writes up relevant documents and papers a transaction, even though you didn't sign off on [the transaction] explicitly, you are a primary violator.' "

In a July 11 Richmond Times-Dispatch story about the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, A. E. Dick Howard observed that the court's conservatism "parallels in many ways, especially in federalism cases, trends in recent years in the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Rehnquist." In a July 27 Associated Press story about Virginia Attorney General Jerry W. Kilgore's offer to submit himself for questioning by lawyers for Democratic state legislators who are suing the state Republican Party, Howard noted how unusual it is for an attorney general to waive official protections that shield him from testimony. "I find it quite fascinating that he'd want to do it," he said. "It's the lesson Washington politicians seem not to learn. It's what Nixon didn't do in Watergate." In an August 23 Newark Star-Ledger article about a William J. Brennan biography that has been in the works for 18 years, Howard noted the obvious challenges in writing a book about a man who spent more than three decades on the Supreme Court, and talked about Brennan's importance:  "Many people, I think, simply don't realize how important he was to the history of the modern court. Generations of students and lawyers will have heard about Justice Brennan, but more and more of them won't have first-hand knowledge of him."

John Jeffries appeared on the July 5 NPR Morning Edition to discuss the enemy combatant cases with which the Supreme Court ended its 2003 term. Although the cases held that persons cannot be detained indefinitely, Jeffries noted that the government had not fared too badly "because all the Supreme Court requires is that they give notice of the basis for regarding someone as an enemy combatant and some fair opportunity for the detainee to rebut that classification. And that's a very minimal standard. It's certainly a long way from what you would expect in a criminal trial, for example, where the government would have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt specific conduct that violated U.S. law."

In an August 22 Associated Press story about the NAACP Legal Defense Fund's continuing fight for civil rights 50 years after Brown v. Board of Education, Michael Klarman questioned whether the example set by the Brown win was a good one—that litigation was the way to change society rather than political action. "If you push a case a little bit before society is ready for it," he said, "you might win and end up hurting your cause. You can push a same-sex marriage case in Massachusetts and win, but notice there is not a single state legislature that is willing to side with you on that. Mostly what you're going to do is mobilize opposition. That's what happened in the South after Brown."

David Martin was quoted in a July 29 Christian Science Monitor story about the Supreme Court's detention decision's impact on Haitian and Cuban refugees. He questioned whether the Supreme Court ruling would accelerate the refugees' legal claims. "Can you get to court? Yes. But what can you claim?" he asked. "I would guess the range of rights one could claim on Guantanamo will be more limited than [someone filing suit from within] full-fledged U.S. territory." In an August 10 New York Times story about the federal government's policy linking aid to hospitals with a requirement that they ask patients about their immigration status (posing such questions as ''Are you a lawful permanent resident, an alien with a valid current employment authorization card or other qualified alien?''), Martin said the questions could befuddle immigrants. ''Those are some pretty technical questions to ask an ailing, not highly educated person,'' he noted.

Robert O'Neil was quoted in a July 10 Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star story about the renaming of the University of Mary Washington, and the board of visitors' surprise that the university president had removed all use of the Mary Washington College name. O'Neil discussed the division of power between university presidents and boards, and noted that university presidents may make controversial decisions unilaterally to spare board members from controversy. "A president might feel that something has to be done, and doesn't want to put the board in the position of having to take the heat, or knowing it might be quite contentious with the board," he said. "Under those circumstances, a president might simply take it on himself, even knowing the board may not have been willing to take that step."

Daniel Ortiz's remarks to a rally against Virginia's new Affirmation of Marriage Act were reported in a July 1 Daily Progress story. Ortiz said that the act, which bars civil unions, partnership contracts or other arrangements between people of the same sex in intimate relationships, was a case of "legislative gay-bashing."

Stephen Smith was quoted in an August 17 Toronto Sun story about the Canadian Bar Association's refusal to ban lawyer-client sexual relations. Lawyers should choose whether to represent the client or have sex with the client, he said. "You don't get to screw the client twice. If you want to sleep with them, don't represent them." Smith was also quoted extensively in an August 26 Daily News Leader story about a Weyers Cave case revolving around whether a killing was in self-defense. "You're entitled to use force to defend yourself," he said, "but deadly force can only be used in cases where you're facing deadly force. The basic rule is you have to match up your force with what you're facing."

Tim Wu appeared on the July 13 NPR Morning Edition to discuss the Supreme Court's increasing use of references to foreign law in its decisions. He noted that a recently introduced congressional resolution that would instruct Supreme Court justices not to cite the rulings of foreign courts is in keeping with American history. "It really goes back to the 1790s in the history of the country," he said. "If you don't like the result of the process, you accuse it of being corrupted by foreign influence." In a July 21 Telecom Policy Report article, Wu criticized another scholar's white paper against MCI's proposal to apply a "layered" approach to broadband regulation. Saying that the paper "lacks any serious intellectual basis," he argued that the other scholar was "saying what he's saying just to be saying something different. I don't think he's given any serious thought to the fundamental flaws in his argument."