Richard Bonnie discussed the insanity plea in the March 12 Quincy, MA, Patriot Ledger, saying that it "is always an uphill battle for the defense in a contested case. We all have a natural skepticism about claims of non-responsibility." In the March 12 Richmond Times-Dispatch, Bonnie discussed the low fees that Virginia pays court-appointed lawyers and noted that lawsuits filed in other states have argued that inadequate compensation and unreasonable caseloads can cause the quality of legal representation to fall below the constitutional standard for effective assistance of counsel.

Rosa Brooks appeared on the Fox News Network's March 16 O'Reilly Factor to discuss a New York Times report about deaths of Afghan and Iraqi prisoners in U.S. custody. Responding to comments that reports of possible criminal homicides were made by disgruntled individuals, she said "If that's the case, it's beginning to seem like there are a lot of disgruntled folks in the military, and, frankly, I don't blame military people if they are disgruntled because the prisoner abuse scandal has been badly mishandled by the U.S. government. It's undermining our efforts on the war on terror." She went on: "I don't think anybody's accusing the U.S. of sanctioning murder. The point is to be open about it—to punish them if they did this, and to put into place whatever mechanisms we need to have to prevent this in the future."

Ruth Buck and Margaret Foster Riley were both featured in an April 11 U.S. News & World Report story on legal writing instruction. Buck said that the legal research and writing program teaches analysis and argument skills more than the fundamentals of good writing. She noted that instructors work hard on writing skills when they give students individual feedback, but that good writing is best learned through years-long mentorships with senior lawyers. The article quoted Riley's comments to her class, including the admonition that "If you think you're really sounding like a lawyer, you're probably doing something wrong."

George Cohen's work was quoted in a March 24 Wall Street Journal article on a malpractice lawsuit against class-action lawyers. "We agree with those who argue that lawyer abuse in class actions is rampant and that the current system . . . is set up to shield lawyers from the consequences of their misdeeds," Cohen and co-author Susan Koniak wrote in the Virginia Law Review. Instead of restricting class actions, which "risks leaving too much corporate and government misconduct undeterred," they argued, "Our answer to class-action abuse is, ‘Sue the bastards.' "

Michael Dooley discussed the effect of the Sears-KMart merger on the March 23 edition of Minnesota Public Radio's Marketplace. He noted that Sears-authorized dealers won't have much contract protection under the merger, but that the company's reputation may work in their favor. "Sears has made its living from its founding in the old Sears catalog at identifying with the values of middle America," he said, "and I am quite sure that the one thing Sears doesn't want is to come out of this looking like an ogre."

Thomas Hafemeister was quoted in a March 3 Washington Post story about the use of hypnosis evidence in a Virginia criminal case. "Usually you have better evidence than that," he said. "It could be so prejudicial. The witnesses are likely, as a result of hypnosis, to be more certain about what happened, and they could be more confident and persuasive." In an April 10 Associated Press story about the use of an insanity plea in a highway sniper case, Hafemeister noted that the plea is used in fewer than one percent of felony cases and rarely succeeds. Those who try it and fail tend to get longer sentences than those who just plead innocent, he said, while those who win tend to spend twice as much time hospitalized as they would have spent in prison if convicted.

A. E. Dick Howard appeared on a March 7 Voice of America Focus Report about the judicial branch, saying that the current Supreme Court has been just as activist as previous courts. "The present court—the Rehnquist court—is a more conservative tribunal," he noted. "But there's no particular sign that the Rehnquist court has made any particular effort to cut back on the sweep and breadth of the kinds of cases that they decide. Judicial activism is clearly being used by conservatives on the court as it was used by liberals on the court in an earlier generation." Howard was quoted in a March 14 Washington Post article about Kenneth Starr's work on behalf of a death row inmate. He noted that Starr "is one of the most seasoned lawyers at the Washington bar," and for a defendant without resources, "if you catch the eye of someone of that stature, it immensely improves your chances." Howard discussed the nature of modern oral argument in a March 28 New Yorker article about Justice Antonin Scalia. "In the eighties, there were three or four Justices who were content to sit back and let the advocate make his argument," he said. "Now it's like eight professors who all think they're going to ask the question that probes the deepest. They don't care about the architecture of an argument; they go straight to the issue they care about. They're using the lawyers as postmen to carry messages down the bench, and the result is often cacophony."

Michael Klarman discussed his recent Bancroft Prize for "From Jim Crow to Civil Rights" in an April 18 History News Network interview. "A lot of the project really emerged out of one of the classes I began teaching around 1991—a course on Constitutional History from Reconstruction to Brown," he said. "Many of the ideas from that course ultimately found their way into the book. People sometimes talk of the synergy between teaching and scholarship, and I consider myself very fortunate to have found that to be the truth." He also discussed the difficulties of writing for "such disparate audiences—law professors and historians. They are interested in different issues, employ different methodologies, and have very different expectations about scholarship. Winning the Bancroft tells me that I was more successful in bridging the divide between academic disciplines than I could reasonably have hoped."

Paul Lombardo was quoted in an April 24 Winston-Salem Journal article about a North Carolina bill proposing cash reparations for victims of eugenic sterilization. "It's time for people to put their money where their mouth is," he said, noting that North Carolina had the third largest eugenics program in the nation, after California and Virginia. Lombardo said he is puzzled that no state has provided any kind of compensation to sterilization victims, when more than a dozen states pay reparations to people who are wrongfully incarcerated.

Julia Mahoney's scholarship was quoted in a March 26 Baltimore Sun article about conservation easements. Warning that scientific understanding of conservation needs changes over time, she wrote in the Virginia Law Review that extensive use of permanent conservation easements "may create ecological, legal and institutional messes for later generations to deal with."

Paul Mahoney's work on the common law and economic growth was discussed in the March 2 issue of El Economista. As the article quoted the conclusion of his Journal of Legal Studies article, "El respeto a los derechos de propiedad y el cumplimiento de los contratos fundados en ellos, delinean el escenario para la inversion y el crecimiento. De ahi que el diseno de las instituciones de gobierno influencia en forma decisiva el rendimiento de las actividades productivas y, en consecuencia, el ritmo de crecimiento economico."

David Martin was quoted in an April ABA Journal article on recent cases using loss of citizenship as a sanction against suspected criminals and terrorists. He said that he found it unlikely that the cases would "herald a wave of denaturalization actions. I think it will be confined to people who have a criminal conviction within a very short time after naturalization."

John Norton Moore noted in a March 18 Cox News Service article on the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea that the United States's exclusive economic zone would expand about 15 percent under the treaty. "This is one of the greatest increases in sovereign rights of the United States since the Louisiana Purchase, since the purchase of Alaska," he said.

Robert O'Neil wrote an op-ed piece in the March 2 Charlottesville Daily Progress about religion in the Virginia General Assembly, saying that some of its recent actions "make one wonder if our current lawmakers are as keenly aware as they should be of the special role their predecessors played in shaping religious freedom." In a March 28 Time story about congressional efforts to clean up the airwaves, O'Neil noted that the mere threat of legislation can create a chill, calling it "regulation by raised eyebrow." In an April 12 UPI story about the Thomas Jefferson Center's annual Jefferson Muzzle awards, given to publicize restrictions on free speech, O'Neil commented: "In some areas speech is freer today that it was before. The protection of expression on the Internet, for example, is quite striking. Protection of free speech in advertising was unknown three decades ago." O'Neil discussed investigations of controversial professors in the April 15 Chronicle of Higher Education. "If a student ever accused me of, let's say, being insensitive or disparaging a particular religious faith in my class or outside," he said, "I would want an investigation. I wouldn't want that allegation festering."

George Rutherglen was quoted in a March 5 Roanoke Times & World News article about a case in which two Virginia public school employees who had been sexually assaulted by their manager were moved to night shifts and criticized instead of protected from further harassment. Since the manager had been convicted of sexual battery, he said that proving a harassment claim against the school board would not be difficult. But he added that the women's claim that they were retaliated against for whistle-blowing might be more difficult to prove. "The law is clear," he said. "If there was retaliation, they violated the Civil Rights Act. Proving it is another matter."

Stephen Smith was quoted in a March 20 Charlottesville Daily Progress story about a federal judge's frustration with sentencing guidelines that forced him to impose a two-year prison term for growing and selling marijuana. Noting that the recent Supreme Court decision in U.S. v. Booker now allows appeals courts to explore the "reasonableness" in guidelines sentences, he said that "sentencing judges should now be free to impose sentences other than those that would've been required under the guidelines, and appellate courts should uphold those sentences, even if lower than the guidelines sentence, as long as they're not ‘unreasonable.' If that happens, then Booker will have solved one of the key problems with the federal sentencing guidelines: their excessive rigidity and severity."

Robert Turner was quoted in a March 3 Los Angeles Times story about a Supreme Court ruling that an Eastern bloc couple recruited by the CIA during the Cold War could not sue the agency for reneging on a pledge of lifetime support. Turner said the ruling was "fully consistent with the expressed concern of our Founding Fathers about the importance of safeguarding national security secrets."

J. H. Verkerke's comments in a recent New York Times article on blogging's impact on employment rights were quoted in Singapore's April 25 New Paper. After a Delta flight attendant was terminated after posting provocative photographs of herself in crew uniform on her blog, Verkerke noted that she could not "invoke the common law privacy doctrines because she posted these photos in a public place."

Timothy Wu was quoted in two issues of the National Journal's Technology Daily. In a March 31 article on regulating the telecom industry by functional "layers" rather than through the current "silo" regime, which involves imposing rules for each technology, he said that layering is "the first proposal in a while that would actually open competition and would make it hard to block market entry by incumbents." Wu noted in an April 19 article on Internet networks' blocking of telephony services by competitors that "We need clear rules to punish those who block new market entrants," and suggested that broad network anti-discrimination language could do the trick.