A May 4 Legal Times profile of Department of Justice appointee Jack Goldsmith included Curtis Bradley's comments on articles he had written with Goldsmith. "Broadly speaking, we raise questions about whether courts ought to develop rules on international law without guidance from Congress and the executive branch," he said. "There are obviously some people, particularly in the human rights area, who believe international law should be directly incorporated into our legal system." In the May 30 Washington Post, Bradley noted that national security concerns underscore the dangers of allowing Alien Tort Claims Act lawsuits to flourish in U.S. courts. "The use of the statute for human rights litigation, including these corporate suits, inherently involves policy decisions that are better made by the executive and legislative branches, not the judicial branch," he said. "There's a real danger that these lawsuits, if they continue to expand as they have, could truly interfere with relations that we have with foreign governments."

George Cohen was quoted in a June 16 Daily Deal article on potential conflicts of interest for an attorney representing both a takeover target company and the CEO of the company launching the hostile bid, and in a June 23 Reuters News story on the effects of post-Enron crackdowns on the legal profession. "The lawyers have not escaped entirely, but they have gotten off relatively easily," he noted.

In a May 4 Richmond Times-Dispatch article on the admissibility of Lee Boyd Malvo's alleged confession, Anne Coughlin discussed whether police should have stopped questioning Malvo when he asked "Do I get to see my attorneys?" Partly because Malvo was a juvenile, Coughlin said that she "would be inclined to say that's clear and unequivocal" invocation of right to counsel. Any doubt about the confession's validity, she added, "should break in the favor of the suspect." Two weeks later in the May 16 Times-Dispatch, she expressed doubts that the Malvo trial would be moved due to intense media coverage. "There is a great reluctance among judges to send a trial to another location," she said. "It is very expensive, and there are difficult logistical issues. Justice requires that the case be decided where the crime was committed."

A May 19 Washington Post article on White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales included A. E. Dick Howard's comments contrasting Gonzales's moderate record on the Texas Supreme Court with his record as White House counsel suggesting a more expansive view of government power. "Which is the real Alberto Gonzales?" he asked. "If he gets on the Supreme Court, we'll find out." Howard's remarks at a Federalist Society discussion on writing the Iraqi constitution were reported in the June 24 White House Weekly. He noted a number of factors that would impact the establishment of a constitutional liberal democracy in Iraq. He said that Iraq will "need people who will cooperate for the common good. They need trust among the Shiites, the Sunnis and the Kurds; and the people putting together the constitution have to understand Iraq, the region and Islam." Howard also commented on the close of the Supreme Court term in the June 26 Scripps Howard News Service,June 27 Newsday, and June 30 Time magazine. He discussed retirement rumors in the Newsday story, saying "I was predicting nobody would step down, because Rehnquist and O'Connor are having so much fun. And being an ex-justice is not as fun as being a justice."

John Jeffries discussed Justice Lewis Powell's Bakke opinion in the June 1 Richmond Times-Dispatch, noting "What's really remarkable . . . is that the country has not come overwhelmingly to one conclusion or the other, but remains poised in the ambiguity that Powell identified." What Powell did, he explained, "was to create [a situation] where affirmative action could be pursued while at the same time creating arguments for limiting affirmative action. Powell feared that racial and ethnic quotas would degenerate into a kind of spoils system with every group claiming an entitlement of this many places in the class. The effect would be divisive and rigid." Jeffries discussed the Supreme Court's subsequent University of Michigan decisions in the June 24 Detroit News and the June 24 Times-Dispatch. In the Times-Dispatch story, he noted: "What the court has done is to reaffirm and endorse Justice Powell's opinion in the Bakke case. . . . I think they saw the wisdom of what he had done 25 years ago."

Edmund Kitch's comments at a Progress & Freedom Foundation conference on "Promoting Markets in Creativity: Copyright in the Internet Age" were summarized in a June 11 Communications Daily article. The intersection of the Internet with copyright law is occurring in an environment that's "historically novel" in a legal sense, he said, noting that recent law encompasses new technologies and relieves content owners of having to seek additional congressional blessing for each new development. It focuses on the copy itself, not on the technology by which it's made, he said, and thereby puts infringers, not content owners, in the position of needing to ask Congress for help.

David Martin questioned the need for the H-2B foreign "guest" worker program permitting American employers to hire foreigners on a temporary basis in the May 10 Richmond Times-Dispatch. "I'm skeptical of it," he said. "It raises some practical issues and some philosophical issues. I'm inclined to think if we need people for labor, we ought to be willing to offer them full membership in society." A May 19 Legal Times story on the transfer of immigration functions from the Department of Justice to the Department of Homeland Security cited Martin's April essay in Interpreter Releases pointing out that attorneys general are more likely than security secretaries to make decisions favorable to individual rights.

A June American Lawyer story on a pending lawsuit by Gulf War prisoners of war against the Republic of Iraq discussed the background and expertise of co-counsel John Norton Moore, including his extensive experience on POW legal issues. The June 24 White House Weekly included a report of a Federalist Society discussion moderated by Moore on rewriting the Iraqi constitution. He opened the discussion by saying that the U.S. occupation authority is trying to achieve "not simply an electoral democracy, but a constitutional liberal democracy."

A May 26 New York Times article on efforts in several states to limit contingency fees included a summary of Jeffrey O'Connell's recent study of Yellow Pages advertising by lawyers. O'Connell's comments at the annual meeting of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists were featured in the June 1 OB GYN News. He discussed his Early Offers reform plan, under which physicians who believe they might be liable would have the option of making an offer to the plaintiff—who would be obliged by law to accept it unless he could prove that the physician was guilty of gross criminal negligence. "What's in it for the patient?" O'Connell asked. "He gets promptly paid for all his medical expenses and lost wages—just as in workers' compensation—without having to wait for years. And because it is a quick and simple case, he will end up not having to pay his lawyer 40% of what he gets. I know many people say this is flawed because it doesn't pay pain and suffering, and people want it. But we fought that battle with workers' compensation and won it."

In a May 2 Chronicle of Higher Education story on American public opinion of higher education, Robert O'Neil took issue with how one of the questions on tenure was phrased. "Saying that tenure is a job for life is pejorative and just the worst way to characterize academic tenure," he argued. "It's not job security." O'Neil was also quoted in a May/June Columbia Journalism Review article on recent trends in which Internet sites have subjected publishers to libel litigation in other countries and in a June 19 Richmond Times-Dispatch story on the Virginia Department of Transportation's Smart Tag system, in which VDOT collects a variety of identifying information and turns it over to law-enforcement officers. O'Neil was critical of VDOT's policy, asking "Is it necessary for them to know as much as they do? The technology is new, and I have some real sympathy for people who develop and apply new technology without the experience that would alert them to issues like privacy."

A June 9 CongressDaily article on the FCC's recent revision of its media ownership rules included Glen Robinson's view that the previous limit had been vacated, pending FCC justification, by a recent D.C. Circuit case. He had little support, however, for the FCC's new ownership cap of 45 percent. "It's just substituting one number for another," he said. "If I was a betting man, I'd say the appeals court will reverse it again."

Paul Stephan was quoted in the May 8 Los Angeles Times on a dispute over ownership rights to a collection of Soviet-era animated films, saying "In a country like Russia, where there's a lot of stuff that's valuable and no clear understanding of who owns what, there's an incentive to keep uncertain who owns what as long as there's a lot of stuff that can be easily stolen."

A June 21 Daily Press story on the bankruptcy of Hampton's Chamberlin Hotel included George Triantis's comments that declaring bankruptcy just before a public auction in hopes that a buyer will emerge is a common strategy. "Their only hope is to bide some time and wait for the market to change," he said. "There's no point in starting bankruptcy until the very last moment when you need it."

Tim Wu was quoted in a June 30 CNET News article on a copyright infringement lawsuit against the Madster file-swapping network. "I wouldn't say it's the end of the road for [Madster]," he said, "but one of the things that makes it tough is that the [court] is highly critical of the willful blindness approach to running these sorts of companies." The opinion "suggests that deliberately creating something beyond your control is not going to get you out of copyright infringement."