Richard Bonnie was quoted in several news stories about the Washington-area sniper trials, particularly on the issue of Lee Boyd Malvo's use of the insanity defense. In the Nov. 10 Richmond Times-Dispatch, he said that the insanity defense is rarely raised and is successful in only a small fraction of the cases in which it is raised. "When the insanity claim is contested," he said, "especially before a jury, the defendant usually loses. In this sense, a successful insanity claim in a contested case is always an uphill battle for the defense." He noted in the Nov. 17 U.S. News & World Report that insanity defendants usually lose in high-profile cases involving serious crimes and when the experts disagree. Bonnie also commented in a Nov. 8 AP story about an accused pipe bomber's extended treatment at a federal prison hospital, and in a Nov. 28 AP story about the Virginia inmate whose case persuaded the U.S. Supreme Court to exclude mentally retarded murderers from execution.

Rosa Ehrenreich Brooks wrote in the Nov./Dec. issue of Legal Affairs about her August trip to Baghdad and attempts to establish the rule of law in Iraq. She discussed the tensions between the U.S.-led coalition's interest in guaranteeing fair treatment of detainees and respect for Iraq's legal heritage and processes, and wrote that "it would help to openly acknowledge the paradoxes inherent in trying to pull the rule of law from the barrel of a gun. The coalition would do well to declare that the Iraqi judicial system and police will be required to conform to internationally recognized norms of human rights and due process—even if that means stepping on the toes of Iraqi judges for a time." An article in the Sept./Oct. issue of Legal Affairs included quotations from Brooks's Georgetown Law Journal article on workplace harassment law, arguing the law should recognize and punish acts that are "humiliating, intimidating, tormenting, pressuring, or mocking"—even if they do not discriminate based on sex.

Several stories about the Muhammad and Malvo prosecutions featured quotes from Anne Coughlin. In the Nov. 18 Richmond Times-Dispatch, for instance, she commented that the testimony of victims' relatives was likely to overwhelm the Muhammad jury. "The more that the jury sees and hears from relatives about their pain, their loss, their suffering," she said, "they're going to weigh that against any sympathetic case he can make." She commented in the Nov. 25 USA Today that the application of Virginia's antiterrorism statute in the John Muhammad trial would withstand challenge, even though the case "seems to challenge the boundary of that statute." She summed up the two prosecutions in a Dec. 27 AP story:  "I think people close to these crimes, the family members of victims and the family members of the defendants, will always be left with questions," she said. "However, the theory that the state came up with, that John Muhammad was the idea man, the mastermind, and that Malvo was the enthusiastic partner; the state proved that story beyond a reasonable doubt to two juries."

Earl Dudley was quoted in a Nov. 26 New York Times story about the possibility that John Allen Muhammad might face additional trials for other sniper killings, even though he had already been sentenced to death. He questioned the need for further trials, asking "Why do you need to kill a person twice?"

A. E. Dick Howard appeared on the Nov. 21 PBS Religion & Ethics Newsweekly program, discussing the Supreme Court's consideration of Establishment Clause issues this term in Locke v. Davey, which he called "as important potentially as any church and state case the court has heard in the last decade." He noted that "some of the same justices who care the most about federalism and are most inclined to respect state decisions, at the same time tend to be the justices who will be more sensitive to the claims of religious groups that they're being discriminated against in the allocation of religious resources."

Michael Klarman was quoted in a Dec. 16 Village Voice article on the refusal of some heterosexual couples to marry until homosexual marriage is legalized. He noted that this was "a very indirect and inefficacious form of protest. Unless you're going to make it public, nobody knows why you've made that decision." Liberal whites and blacks, he added, didn't protest miscegenation laws by refraining from within-race marriages in great numbers.

A Dec. 21 Washington Post article on conservation easements quoted Julia Mahoney's comments in a Virginia Law Review article arguing that it was foolhardy for today's conservationists to use easements to impose their will on the future. "We lack the technical competence to make land-use decisions for future generations," she wrote.

A Dec. 7 Richmond Times-Dispatch article on a USA Patriot Act conference at U.Va. summarized Charles McCurdy's comments outlining the history of restraints on civil liberties and emergency powers going back to the presidencies of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. McCurdy noted that free speech and other civil liberties have been trampled several times and then gradually restored by courts. "Security concerns have often trumped liberty in ways that were subsequently regretted," he said.

The Dec. 12 New York Times quoted Richard Merrill in a story on the FDA's consideration of over-the-counter sales of a morning-after pill to prevent pregnancy. In about 30 countries and five U.S. states, pharmacists sell the pills without prescriptions, in a category between prescription and over the counter. Merrill noted that individual states can allow sales by pharmacists, but that this is not an option for the FDA. "Drugs are either prescription or over the counter," he said.

John Norton Moore was quoted in a Nov. 10 New York Times story about the Bush administration's efforts to block Persian Gulf war POWs from collecting frozen Iraqi assets they won in a court ruling against the Saddam Hussein government. "This was a major human rights decision," he said. "It never occurred to me in my wildest dreams that I would then see our government coming in on the side of Saddam Hussein and his regime to absolve them of responsibility for the brutal torture of Americans."  Moore commented in a Dec. 9 Fox News story about U.S. authority to pursue and capture terror suspects abroad: "I know we need to be quite sensitive in working with other countries, but I think it's critically important to maintain the ability to effectively deter and defend ourselves against terrorists who kill Americans."

Thomas Nachbar was quoted in a Nov. 3 Newsweek story about an artist's lawsuit under the Visual Artists Rights Act to prevent a corporation from either moving his sculpture or returning it to him. Nachbar noted if the sculptor is successful, he could set a disturbing precedent and chill future art sales. "If you contract with someone to put a sculpture in your garden, that would effectively give control of your garden to the artist," he said.

In a Nov. 28 Hartford Courant story on Locke v. Davey, the Supreme Court case involving a state's prohibition on using government scholarship funds for religious education, Robert O'Neil noted that there was legal precedent for states establishing a "respectful distance" between government and religion. "That's what a federal system is all about," he said.

Daniel Ortiz appeared on the Dec. 8 NPR Weekend All Things Considered, discussing the need to reform political gerrymandering. He explained that the trend towards uncontested "safe" House seats "leads to what may be actually the greatest problem here, which is just political polarization. If every district is safe, the primary's the only election that matters. As we all know, the voters who participate in a primary aren't representative of the electorate as a whole; in fact, aren't even representative of their own party. It's really the party's most vociferous, active and ideological members who turn out disproportionately to vote in party primaries." Ortiz was also quoted in the Dec. 15 National Law Journal on the Supreme Court's campaign finance decision. He noted that the decision is "fairly conservative, doctrinally," and that much of the decision, particularly the soft money ruling, relies on Buckley v. Valeo's "troubling distinction between contributions and expenditures."

Elizabeth Scott was quoted in several articles on the execution of juvenile offenders. Her work in American Psychologist and the Texas Law Review was quoted in the Nov. 25 New York Times and the Dec. 14 Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel, and in the Dec. 25 New York Times she noted that the jury's decision in the Lee Malvo case had sent an important message by sentencing him to life in prison. "The Malvo verdict should be taken as a signal that the public has little enthusiasm for executing juveniles," she said, "even for the most horrendous of crimes, and that people understand that young offenders are less culpable than adults." She added: "Current knowledge about brain development in adolescence supports the commonly held intuition that even 17-year-olds are less mature than adults, something that the law recognizes in almost every other area."

Stephen Smith was quoted in a Nov. 21 Newport News Daily Press story about charges against the chairman of the Hampton School Board after he shot a neighbor's Vietnamese pot-bellied pig. Smith said it's often inevitable that a defendant's status as a public figure changes criminal court proceedings in some way. "Those kind of people aren't treated the same way as other people," he said. "It's an unfortunate reality, but it's still a reality of our system." Smith was also quoted in a Dec. 7 Roanoke Times & World News story about U.S. Attorney John Brownlee. "U.S. attorneys are political animals," he said. "There's definitely a political calculus that goes along with these law enforcement decisions." Smith said there is a political incentive for federal prosecutors across the nation to focus on drugs and violent crime because "that's what the public thinks of when they think of crime."