President Chooses Conservative Judge as Nominee to Court - New York Times

President Chooses Conservative Judge as Nominee to Court - New York TimesPresident Chooses Conservative Judge as Nominee to Court
By ELISABETH BUMILLER
and DAVID STOUT

WASHINGTON, July 19 - President Bush is nominating John G. Roberts Jr., a conservative federal appellate judge from Washington, D.C., to the first vacancy on the Supreme Court in 11 years.

President Bush was to announce the selection of Judge Roberts, who sits on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, on television at 9 p.m. But news of the selection leaked out in advance of the White House ceremony.

News of Judge Roberts's selection came at the end of a day of whirlwind speculation that, for several hours, had put Judge Edith Brown Clement of the federal appeals court in New Orleans, then Judge J. Michael Luttig of the federal appeals court in Richmond, Va., at or near the top of the list of candidates.

Judge Roberts, 50, once clerked for Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist when the chief was an associate justice and is viewed as one of the more accomplished lawyers to argue before the Supreme Court, having won more than two dozen cases before becoming a judge.

The judge has been on the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit since May 2003. That court has often been a springboard for the Supreme Court; indeed, three current members of the high court, Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, were once on the D.C. Circuit.

Mr. Bush had playfully deflected questions earlier in the day about whom he might choose, telling reporters as he has many times before that he would pick a jurist "who will not legislate from the bench."

If confirmed, Judge Roberts might tilt the balance of the court rightward. Justice O'Connor, who has been on the tribunal for 24 years and was the first woman on the Supreme Court, was widely regarded as a swing justice between the liberal and conservative blocs.

The nominee will now undergo a background investigation. Then his nomination will be considered by the Senate Judiciary Committee, whose chairman, Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, has said he wants to schedule hearings by late August or September.

If recent history is a guide, the nominee will be questioned extensively about his views on divisive social issues, especially abortion. Republicans have a 10-to-8 advantage on the Judiciary Committee, and they have 55 seats in the Senate, so chances for confirmation would appear to be good - unless the nominee's views arouse enough opposition to inspire a Democratic filibuster.

Nor can opposition from conservatives be entirely ruled out. While Judge Roberts is viewed as a conservative, has yet to rule on any major abortion case. Consequently, some conservatives have worried that he could be "another Souter."

Justice David H. Souter, installed on the Supreme Court in 1990 by the first President Bush, has been more liberal than some conservatives had expected, to their great consternation. Many conservatives have never shed their bitterness from the Senate's 1987 rejection of Judge Robert H. Bork's nomination to the Supreme Court.

While it can be dicey to speculate on how the confirmation debate will unfold, it will not be surprising if some people in and out of Washington express disappointment that the president did not choose another woman to replace Justice O'Connor, or perhaps use the vacancy to nominate the first Hispanic justice.

Judge Roberts was born in Buffalo and graduated summa cum laude from Harvard. He was a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard Law School. He was a clerk for Judge Henry J. Friendly of the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in 1980 and 1981 before working for Justice Rehnquist.

Earlier in the day, Mr. Bush had been coy about when he might announce his choice.

"I'm comfortable with where we are in the process," Mr. Bush said at a news conference, adding that he has been interviewing candidates "from different walks of life," some of whom he knows well and others with whom he is less familiar.

Republicans close to the White House said in recent days that a leading candidate for the position was Judge Clement of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, in New Orleans. The president declined to answer directly when asked whether he thought it important to select a woman to replace the retiring Justice O'Connor.

Groping momentarily for words, Mr. Bush said he was trying for a reply "that sounds profound to you without actually answering your question." Turning more serious, he reiterated his position that he wants a jurist "who will not legislate from the bench."

"I'll let you know when I'm ready to tell you about it," the president said at a question-and-answer session with Prime Minister John Howard of Australia.

Administration officials said on Monday that that the selection process was moving far faster than they had expected. They also said that Mr. Bush's remarks on Monday morning in an East Room news conference, in which the president suggested that he would take more time to interview candidates, did not rule out a quick announcement.

A Republican with close ties to the administration said that Judge Clement was interviewed as a potential nominee at the White House about a month ago, when the administration was preparing for the possible retirement of Chief Justice Rehnquist. Since then, Justice O'Connor has announced that she will step down while Chief Justice Rehnquist, who has thyroid cancer, has said that he will remain on the job as long as his health permits.

David Stout contributed reporting for this article.

dailyrecord - GOLF: DAY CUB BECAME A TIGER

dailyrecord - GOLF: DAY CUB BECAME A TIGERGOLF: DAY CUB BECAME A TIGER

Jul 19 2005

Dad's rollicking inspired champ

By David Mccarthy

TIGER WOODS' father once called him a disgrace for quitting on the course How the rest of the world's golfers must wish Earl Woods had kept his mouth shut the day he delivered a rollicking his 13-year-old son never forgot.

For that was the last time Woods failed to give his all with a club in his hands.

And his refusal to quit and desire to become a better golfer every day have fuelled a career in which Woods has bagged a milestone 10 Majors five and half months short of his 30th birthday.

Coach Hank Haney has been credited with changing the world No.1's swing over the past year.

Woods used it to deadly effect at St Andrews last week to win his second Open at the Fife links.

But 50-year-old Texan Haney believes Tiger's father has had a much bigger influence.

He said: 'The thing that amazes me most about Tiger is he has absolutely no quit in him. None.

'Last year at Tiger's wedding I had a chance to talk to his father and asked how he instilled that in him.

'Earl traced it to a junior tournament on Tiger's 13th birthday. Even then people knew who Tiger Woods was - the gallery sang Happy Birthday to him on the first tee.

'Tiger proceeded to play poorly, and in full view of everyone he began pouting, whining and slapping the ball around the course.

'Earl took him into the snack bar after the round, locked the door and they had a little talk.

'He told Tiger his behaviour was a disgrace and reminded him the game didn't owe him anything, the course didn't owe him anything and he, Earl, sure didn't owe him anything.

'He told him pouting and whining were just other forms of quitting. Earl said Tiger didn't talk to him on the flight home and gave him the silent treatment for two days after that.

'On the third day Tiger told him, 'Pop, I heard every word you said. I promise I'll never quit again,' and he never has.

'Tiger has 42 career victories and more than 100 top-10 finishes but it's his record cut streak that shows best of all that he never quits.

'Earl Woods, in my opinion, has done the greatest job in coaching anyone has done in the history of sport.

'That's the reason I told Tiger to never refer to me as his coach-I'm just a friend who helps him out once in a while with his swing. Tiger's parents, Earl and Tida, are his coaches, and they've done a remarkable job.'

Haney went on to send out a message that should induce a shudder in the rest by insisting Woods is nowhere near satisfied he is playing as well as he can.

He said: 'He keeps getting better and better and better. He basically works 12 hours a day, working out and practising. Not just in the run-up to tournaments, all the time.

'But I don't think he'll ever get to where he wants to be. He is always going to want to keep getting better.

'He had knee surgery and now the knee is stronger than ever. He's never had back problems and he spends two hours a day in the gym trying to make himself stronger.

'It's hard to get him to take a day off and that's what gives him an edge. He's a man who doesn't tire.

'All the talk is about Vijay Singh being the hardest worker in the game but if he works harder than Tiger, he's found a way of putting more than 24 hours into a day.'

Haney hooked up with Woods after spending years coaching Tiger's best mate Mark O'Meara.

He believes it was only a matter of time before the game's top player put on the kind of show that thrilled the 200,000 fans who visited St Andrews last week.

Haney said: 'The way he was striking the ball, I told him the only way he wouldn't come home with the trophy was if he didn't spend enough time on his putting.

'He took his game to another level last week. He's had that other level on the driving range for some time and now he is finally trusting it on the golf course.

'Golfers come into their prime in their 30s so there's no reason why he won't keep getting better. There's a very good chance he can get to Jack Nicklaus' record of 18 Majors.

'Tiger will continue into his 40s because he's the most motivated man I know.'

Haney's words echo Woods' own after his win on Sunday.

The champion cuddled the Claret Jug and said: 'The drive is always to get better. You can always get better, no matter what.

'You never get there - that's the fun of it. No matter how well you play, you can always play better. That's what makes it exciting the next day.'

If you were at St Andrews and thought you heard thunder rumble about 8pm on Sunday, it wasn't.

It was merely the collective groan from Singh, Woods, Monty, Mickelson, Goosen and the rest.

Woods is going nowhere. And while he's around, they'll be going nowhere either

The New York Times > Books > Sunday Book Review > 'The World Is Flat': The Wealth of Yet More Nations

The New York Times > Books > Sunday Book Review > 'The World Is Flat': The Wealth of Yet More Nations The New York Times
May 1, 2005
'The World Is Flat': The Wealth of Yet More Nations
By FAREED ZAKARIA
THE WORLD IS FLAT
A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century.
By Thomas L. Friedman.
488 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $27.50.

OVER the past few years, the United States has been obsessed with the Middle East. The administration, the news media and the American people have all been focused almost exclusively on the region, and it has seemed that dealing with its problems would define the early decades of the 21st century. ''The war on terror is a struggle that will last for generations,'' Donald Rumsfeld is reported to have said to his associates after 9/11.

But could it be that we're focused on the wrong problem? The challenge of Islamic terrorism is real enough, but could it prove to be less durable than it once appeared? There are some signs to suggest this. The combined power of most governments of the world is proving to be a match for any terror group. In addition, several of the governments in the Middle East are inching toward modernizing and opening up their societies. This will be a long process but it is already draining some of the rage that undergirded Islamic extremism.

This doesn't mean that the Middle East will disappear off the map. Far from it. Terrorism remains a threat, and we will all continue to be fascinated by upheavals in Lebanon, events in Iran and reforms in Egypt. But ultimately these trends are unlikely to shape the world's future. The countries of the Middle East have been losers in the age of globalization, out of step in an age of free markets, free trade and democratic politics. The world's future -- the big picture -- is more likely to be shaped by the winners of this era. And if the United States thought it was difficult to deal with the losers, the winners present an even thornier set of challenges. This is the implication of the New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman's excellent new book, ''The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century.''

The metaphor of a flat world, used by Friedman to describe the next phase of globalization, is ingenious. It came to him after hearing an Indian software executive explain how the world's economic playing field was being leveled. For a variety of reasons, what economists call ''barriers to entry'' are being destroyed; today an individual or company anywhere can collaborate or compete globally. Bill Gates explains the meaning of this transformation best. Thirty years ago, he tells Friedman, if you had to choose between being born a genius in Mumbai or Shanghai and an average person in Poughkeepsie, you would have chosen Poughkeepsie because your chances of living a prosperous and fulfilled life were much greater there. ''Now,'' Gates says, ''I would rather be a genius born in China than an average guy born in Poughkeepsie.''

The book is done in Friedman's trademark style. You travel with him, meet his wife and kids, learn about his friends and sit in on his interviews. Some find this irritating. I think it works in making complicated ideas accessible. Another Indian entrepreneur, Jerry Rao, explained to Friedman why his accounting firm in Bangalore was able to prepare tax returns for Americans. (In 2005, an estimated 400,000 American I.R.S. returns were prepared in India.) ''Any activity where we can digitize and decompose the value chain, and move the work around, will get moved around. Some people will say, 'Yes, but you can't serve me a steak.' True, but I can take the reservation for your table sitting anywhere in the world,'' Rao says. He ended the interview by describing his next plan, which is to link up with an Israeli company that can transmit CAT scans via the Internet so that Americans can get a second opinion from an Indian or Israeli doctor, quickly and cheaply.

What created the flat world? Friedman stresses technological forces. Paradoxically, the dot-com bubble played a crucial role. Telecommunications companies like Global Crossing had hundreds of millions of dollars of cash -- given to them by gullible investors -- and they used it to pursue incredibly ambitious plans to ''wire the world,'' laying fiber-optic cable across the ocean floors, connecting Bangalore, Bangkok and Beijing to the advanced industrial countries. This excess supply of connectivity meant that the costs of phone calls, Internet connections and data transmission declined dramatically -- so dramatically that many of the companies that laid these cables went bankrupt. But the deed was done, the world was wired. Today it costs about as much to connect to Guangdong as it does New Jersey.

The next blow in this one-two punch was the dot-com bust. The stock market crash made companies everywhere cut spending. That meant they needed to look for ways to do what they were doing for less money. The solution: outsourcing. General Electric had led the way a decade earlier and by the late 1990's many large American companies were recognizing that Indian engineers could handle most technical jobs they needed done, at a tenth the cost. The preparations for Y2K, the millennium bug, gave a huge impetus to this shift since most Western companies needed armies of cheap software workers to recode their computers. Welcome to Bangalore.

A good bit of the book is taken up with a discussion of these technological forces and the way in which business has reacted and adapted to them. Friedman explains the importance of the development of ''work flow platforms,'' software that made it possible for all kinds of computer applications to connect and work together, which is what allowed seamless cooperation by people working anywhere. ''It is the creation of this platform, with these unique attributes, that is the truly important sustainable breakthrough that has made what you call the flattening of the world possible,'' Microsoft's chief technology officer, Craig J. Mundie, told Friedman.

Friedman has a flair for business reporting and finds amusing stories about Wal-Mart, UPS, Dell and JetBlue, among others, that relate to his basic theme. Did you know that when you order a burger at the drive-through McDonald's on Interstate 55 near Cape Girardeau, Mo., the person taking your order is at a call center 900 miles away in Colorado Springs? (He or she then zaps it back to that McDonald's and the order is ready a few minutes later as you drive around to the pickup window.) Or that when you call JetBlue for a reservation, you're talking to a housewife in Utah, who does the job part time? Or that when you ship your Toshiba laptop for repairs via UPS, it's actually UPS's guys in the ''funny brown shorts'' who do the fixing?

China and India loom large in Friedman's story because they are the two big countries benefiting most from the flat world. To take just one example, Wal-Mart alone last year imported $18 billion worth of goods from its 5,000 Chinese suppliers. (Friedman doesn't do the math, but this would mean that of Wal-Mart's 6,000 suppliers, 80 percent are in one country -- China.) The Indian case is less staggering and still mostly in services, though the trend is dramatically upward. But Friedman understands that China and India represent not just threats to the developed world, but also great opportunities. After all, the changes he is describing have the net effect of adding hundreds of millions of people -- consumers -- to the world economy. That is an unparalleled opportunity for every company and individual in the world.

Friedman quotes a Morgan Stanley study estimating that since the mid-1990's cheap imports from China have saved American consumers over $600 billion and probably saved American companies even more than that since they use Chinese-sourced parts in their production. And this is not all about cheap labor. Between 1995 and 2002, China's private sector has increased productivity at 17 percent annually -- a truly breathtaking pace.

Friedman describes his honest reaction to this new world while he's at one of India's great outsourcing companies, Infosys. He was standing, he says, ''at the gate observing this river of educated young people flowing in and out. . . . They all looked as if they had scored 1600 on their SAT's. . . . My mind just kept telling me, 'Ricardo is right, Ricardo is right.' . . . These Indian techies were doing what was their comparative advantage and then turning around and using their income to buy all the products from America that are our comparative advantage. . . . Both our countries would benefit. . . . But my eye kept . . . telling me something else: 'Oh, my God, there are just so many of them, and they all look so serious, so eager for work. And they just keep coming, wave after wave. How in the world can it possibly be good for my daughters and millions of other young Americans that these Indians can do the same jobs as they can for a fraction of the wages?' ''

He ends up, wisely, understanding that there's no way to stop the wave. You cannot switch off these forces except at great cost to your own economic well-being. Over the last century, those countries that tried to preserve their systems, jobs, culture or traditions by keeping the rest of the world out all stagnated. Those that opened themselves up to the world prospered. But that doesn't mean you can't do anything to prepare for this new competition and new world. Friedman spends a good chunk of the book outlining ways that America and Americans can place themselves in a position to do better.

People in advanced countries have to find ways to move up the value chain, to have special skills that create superior products for which they can charge extra. The UPS story is a classic example of this. Delivering goods doesn't have high margins, but repairing computers (and in effect managing a supply chain) does. In one of Friedman's classic anecdote-as-explanation shticks, he recounts that one of his best friends is an illustrator. The friend saw his business beginning to dry up as computers made routine illustrations easy to do, and he moved on to something new. He became an illustration consultant, helping clients conceive of what they want rather than simply executing a drawing. Friedman explains this in Friedman metaphors: the friend's work began as a chocolate sauce, was turned into a vanilla commodity, through upgraded skills became a special chocolate sauce again, and then had a cherry put on top. All clear?

Of course it won't be as easy as that, as Friedman knows. He points to the dramatic erosion of America's science and technology base, which has been masked in recent decades by another aspect of globalization. America now imports foreigners to do the scientific work that its citizens no longer want to do or even know how to do. Nearly one in five scientists and engineers in the United States is an immigrant, and 51 percent of doctorates in engineering go to foreigners. America's soaring health care costs are increasingly a burden in a global race, particularly since American industry is especially disadvantaged on this issue. An American carmaker pays about $6,000 per worker for health care. If it moves its factory up to Canada, where the government runs and pays for medical coverage, the company pays only $800. Most of Friedman's solutions to these kinds of problems are intelligent, neoliberal ways of using government in a market-friendly way to further the country's ability to compete in a flat world.

There are difficulties with the book. Once Friedman gets through explicating his main point, he throws in too many extras -- perhaps trying to make that chocolate sundae -- making the book seem slightly padded. The process of flattening that he is describing is in its infancy. India is still a poor third-world country, but if you read this book you would assume it is on the verge of becoming a global superstar. (Though as an Indian-American, I read Friedman and whisper the old Jewish saying, ''From your lips to God's ears.'') And while this book is not as powerful as Friedman's earlier ones -- it is, as the publisher notes, an ''update'' of ''The Lexus and the Olive Tree'' -- its fundamental insight is true and deeply important.

In explaining this insight and this new world, Friedman can sometimes sound like a technological determinist. And while he does acknowledge political factors, they get little space in the book, which gives it a lopsided feel. I would argue that one of the primary forces driving the flat world is actually the shifting attitudes and policies of governments around the world. From Brazil to South Africa to India, governments are becoming more market-friendly, accepting that the best way to cure poverty is to aim for high-growth policies. This change, more than any other, has unleashed the energy of the private sector. After all, India had hundreds of thousands of trained engineers in the 1970's, but they didn't produce growth. In the United States and Europe, deregulation policies spurred the competition that led to radical innovation. There is a chicken-and-egg problem, to be sure. Did government policies create the technological boom or vice versa? At least one can say that each furthered the other.

The largest political factor is, of course, the structure of global politics. The flat economic world has been created by an extremely unflat political world. The United States dominates the globe like no country since ancient Rome. It has been at the forefront, pushing for open markets, open trade and open politics. But the consequence of these policies will be to create a more nearly equal world, economically and politically. If China grows economically, at some point it will also gain political ambitions. If Brazil continues to surge, it will want to have a larger voice on the international stage. If India gains economic muscle, history suggests that it will also want the security of a stronger military. Friedman tells us that the economic relations between states will be a powerful deterrent to war, which is true if nations act sensibly. But as we have seen over the last three years, pride, honor and rage play a large part in global politics.

The ultimate challenge for America -- and for Americans -- is whether we are prepared for this flat world, economic and political. While hierarchies are being eroded and playing fields leveled as other countries and people rise in importance and ambition, are we conducting ourselves in a way that will succeed in this new atmosphere? Or will it turn out that, having globalized the world, the United States had forgotten to globalize itself?

Fareed Zakaria, the editor of Newsweek International and author of ''The Future of Freedom,'' is the host of a new current affairs program on public television, Foreign Exchange.

Unnecessary Powers - New York Times

Unnecessary Powers - New York TimesJuly 11, 2005
Unnecessary Powers

The Patriot Act already gives government too much power to spy on ordinary Americans, but things could get far worse. Congress is considering adding a broad new investigative power, known as the administrative subpoena, that would allow the Federal Bureau of Investigation to gain access to anyone's financial, medical, employment and even library records without approval from a judge and even without the target knowing about it. Members of Congress should block this disturbing provision from becoming law.

The Senate is at work on a bill to reauthorize parts of the Patriot Act that are scheduled to expire later this year. In addition to extending those provisions, the Senate Intelligence Committee is proposing to add an array of new "investigative tools." The administrative subpoena is not the only one of the new provisions of the current bill that would endanger civil liberties, but it is the worst.

When the F.B.I. wants access to private records about an individual, it ordinarily needs to get the approval of a judge or a grand jury. The proposed new administrative subpoena power would allow the F.B.I. to call people in and force them to produce records on its own authority, without approval from the judicial branch. This kind of secret, compelled evidence not tied to any court is incompatible with basic American principles of justice. It would also make it far easier for the F.B.I. to go off on fishing expeditions.

The bill would allow the F.B.I. to order that the subpoenas be kept secret. That means record holders, like banks or employers, would not be able to inform the person whose private information was being handed over. It would also make it difficult for Congress, and the public, to know whether the F.B.I. was abusing its enormous new powers.

Defenders of the bill argue that a subpoena could still be challenged in court, but this is a hollow right. In many cases, the person whose records would be turned over - who has the greatest incentive to fight the subpoena - would not know what was going on. The record holder, who would be in a position to challenge the subpoena, may have little incentive to spend the money and time to do so.

The bill's defenders note that administrative subpoenas are already allowed in other kinds of investigations. But these are generally in highly regulated areas, like Medicaid billing. The administrative subpoena power in the new bill would apply to anything the F.B.I. deemed related to alleged foreign intelligence or terrorism, and could, in practice, give the F.B.I. access to almost any private records it wanted.

The proposed new administrative subpoena power is a solution in search of a problem. In testimony before Congress, the F.B.I. could not point to examples of national security investigations that were deterred by its lack of administrative subpoena power.

There could be a case that the F.B.I. should have this power in true emergencies, but that would require a very narrowly drawn provision that applied only in exigent circumstances. The Senate is considering something far more sweeping and dangerous: giving the F.B.I. an open-ended license to invade the privacy of ordinary Americans.

We're Not in Watergate Anymore - New York Times

We're Not in Watergate Anymore - New York TimesJuly 10, 2005
We're Not in Watergate Anymore
By FRANK RICH

WHEN John Dean published his book "Worse Than Watergate" in the spring of 2004, it seemed rank hyperbole: an election-year screed and yet another attempt by a Nixon alumnus to downgrade Watergate crimes by unearthing worse "gates" thereafter. But it's hard to be dismissive now that my colleague Judy Miller has been taken away in shackles for refusing to name the source for a story she never wrote. No reporter went to jail during Watergate. No news organization buckled like Time. No one instigated a war on phony premises. This is worse than Watergate.

To start to see why, forget all the legalistic chatter about shield laws and turn instead to "The Secret Man," Bob Woodward's new memoir about life with Deep Throat. The book arrived in stores just as Judy Miller was jailed, as if by divine intervention to help illuminate her case.

Should a journalist protect a sleazy, possibly even criminal, source? Yes, sometimes, if the public is to get news of wrongdoing. Mark Felt was a turncoat with alternately impenetrable and self-interested motives who betrayed the F.B.I. and, in Mr. Woodward's words, "lied to his colleagues, friends and even his family." (Mr. Felt even lied in his own 1979 memoir.) Should a journalist break a promise of confidentiality after, let alone before, the story is over? "It is critical that confidential sources feel they would be protected for life," Mr. Woodward writes. "There needed to be a model out there where people could come forward or speak when contacted, knowing they would be protected. It was a matter of my work, a matter of honor."

That honorable model, which has now been demolished at Time, was a given in what seems like the halcyon Watergate era of "The Secret Man." Mr. Woodward and Carl Bernstein had confidence that The Washington Post's publisher, Katharine Graham, and editor, Ben Bradlee, would back them to the hilt, even though the Nixon White House demonized their reporting as inaccurate (as did some journalistic competitors) and threatened the licenses of television stations owned by the Post Company.

At Time, Norman Pearlstine - a member of the board of the Committee to Protect Journalists, no less - described his decision to turn over Matt Cooper's files to the feds as his own, made on the merits and without consulting any higher-ups at Time Warner. That's no doubt the truth, but a corporate mentality needn't be imposed by direct fiat; it's a virus that metastasizes in the bureaucratic bloodstream. I doubt anyone at Time Warner ever orders an editor to promote a schlocky Warner Brothers movie either. (Entertainment Weekly did two covers in one month on "The Matrix Reloaded.")

Time Warner seems to have far too much money on the table in Washington to exercise absolute editorial freedom when covering the government; at this moment it's awaiting an F.C.C. review of its joint acquisition (with Comcast) of the bankrupt cable company Adelphia. "Is this a journalistic company or an entertainment company?" David Halberstam asked after the Pearlstine decision. We have the answer now. What high-level source would risk talking to Time about governmental corruption after this cave-in? What top investigative reporter would choose to work there?

But the most important difference between the Bush and Nixon eras has less to do with the press than with the grave origins of the particular case that has sent Judy Miller to jail. This scandal didn't begin, as Watergate did, simply with dirty tricks and spying on the political opposition. It began with the sending of American men and women to war in Iraq.

Specifically, it began with the former ambassador Joseph Wilson's July 6, 2003, account on the Times Op-Ed page (and in concurrent broadcast appearances) of his 2002 C.I.A. mission to Africa to determine whether Saddam Hussein had struck a deal in Niger for uranium that might be used in nuclear weapons. Mr. Wilson concluded that there was no such deal, as my colleague Nicholas Kristof reported, without divulging Mr. Wilson's name, that spring. But the envoy's dramatic Op-Ed piece got everyone's attention: a government insider with firsthand knowledge had stepped out of the shadows of anonymity to expose the administration's game authoritatively on the record. He had made palpable what Bush critics increasingly suspected, writing that "some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat."

Up until that point, the White House had consistently stuck by the 16 incendiary words in President Bush's January 2003 State of the Union address: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." The administration had ignored all reports, not just Mr. Wilson's, that this information might well be bogus. But it still didn't retract Mr. Bush's fiction some five weeks after the State of the Union, when Mohamed ElBaradei, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, announced that the uranium claim was based on fake documents. Instead, we marched on to war in Iraq days later. It was not until Mr. Wilson's public recounting of his African mission more than five months after the State of the Union that George Tenet at long last released a hasty statement (on a Friday evening, just after the Wilson Op-Ed piece) conceding that "these 16 words should never have been included in the text written for the president."

The Niger uranium was hardly the only dubious evidence testifying to Saddam's supposed nuclear threat in the run-up to war. Judy Miller herself was one of two reporters responsible for a notoriously credulous front-page Times story about aluminum tubes that enabled the administration's propaganda campaign to trump up Saddam's W.M.D. arsenal. But red-hot uranium was sexy, and it was Mr. Wilson's flat refutation of it that drove administration officials to seek their revenge: they told the columnist Robert Novak that Mr. Wilson had secured his (nonpaying) African mission through the nepotistic intervention of his wife, a covert C.I.A. officer whom they outed by name. The pettiness of this retribution shows just how successfully Mr. Wilson hit the administration's jugular: his revelation threatened the legitimacy of the war on which both the president's reputation and re-election campaign had been staked.

This was another variation on a Watergate theme. Charles Colson's hit men broke into the office of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist, seeking information to smear Mr. Ellsberg after he leaked the Pentagon Papers, the classified history of the Vietnam War, to The Times. But there was even greater incentive to smear Mr. Wilson than Mr. Ellsberg. Nixon compounded the Vietnam War but didn't start it. The war in Iraq, by contrast, is Mr. Bush's invention.

Again following the Watergate template, the Bush administration at first tried to bury the whole Wilson affair by investigating itself. Even when The Washington Post reported two months after Mr. Wilson's Op-Ed that "two top White House officials" had called at least six reporters, not just Mr. Novak, to destroy Mr. Wilson and his wife, the inquiry was kept safely within the John Ashcroft Justice Department, with the attorney general, according to a Times report, being briefed regularly on details of the investigation. If that rings a Watergate bell now, that's because on Thursday you may have read the obituary of L. Patrick Gray, Mark Felt's F.B.I. boss, who, in a similarly cozy conflict of interest, kept the Nixon White House abreast of the supposedly independent Watergate inquiry in its early going.

Political pressure didn't force Mr. Ashcroft to relinquish control of the Wilson investigation to a special prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, until Dec. 30, 2003, more than five months after Mr. Novak's column ran. Now 18 more months have passed, and no one knows what crime Mr. Fitzgerald is investigating. Is it the tricky-to-prosecute outing of Mr. Wilson's wife, the story Judy Miller never even wrote about? Or has Mr. Fitzgerald moved on to perjury and obstruction of justice possibly committed by those who tried to hide their roles in that outing? If so, it would mean the Bush administration was too arrogant to heed the most basic lesson of Watergate: the cover-up is worse than the crime.

"Mr. Fitzgerald made his bones prosecuting the mob," intoned the pro-Bush editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, "and doesn't seem to realize that this case isn't about organized crime." But that may be exactly what it is about to an ambitious prosecutor with his own career on the line. That the Bush administration would risk breaking the law with an act as self-destructive to American interests as revealing a C.I.A. officer's identity smacks of desperation. It makes you wonder just what else might have been done to suppress embarrassing election-season questions about the war that has mired us in Iraq even as the true perpetrators of 9/11 resurface in Madrid, London and who knows where else.

IN his original Op-Ed piece in The Times, published two years to the day before Judy Miller went to jail, Mr. Wilson noted that "more than 200 American soldiers have lost their lives in Iraq already," before concluding that "we have a duty to ensure that their sacrifice came for the right reasons." As that death toll surges past 1,700, that sacred duty cannot be abandoned by a free press now.

Copyright literature current awareness

Copyright literature current awarenessAbout the “Current copyright literature” website:

The "Current copyright literature" website is a resource for keeping informed of current articles related to U.S. copyright law. This service is edited by Tobe Liebert, the Assistant Director for Collection Development & Special Projects at the Tarlton Law Library.

Here's the process: I review law journals and law reviews (and a great many other legal periodicals) as they are received in the library. I examine the table of contents of all of these publications and identify any article concerning U.S. copyright law. I then input the basic bibliographic information about each article into this database, and scan the first page of the article. The availability of the first page of the article should better enable readers to know if they are interested in reading the whole article.

I anticipate that this website will be updated a couple of times a week, depending on the volume of cites.

My position on “fair use”: Only the first page of an article will be scanned and images will be deleted after 60 days. This service is for non-commercial, educational purposes only.

Copyright literature current awareness

Copyright literature current awarenessAbout the “Current copyright literature” website:

The "Current copyright literature" website is a resource for keeping informed of current articles related to U.S. copyright law. This service is edited by Tobe Liebert, the Assistant Director for Collection Development & Special Projects at the Tarlton Law Library.

Here's the process: I review law journals and law reviews (and a great many other legal periodicals) as they are received in the library. I examine the table of contents of all of these publications and identify any article concerning U.S. copyright law. I then input the basic bibliographic information about each article into this database, and scan the first page of the article. The availability of the first page of the article should better enable readers to know if they are interested in reading the whole article.

I anticipate that this website will be updated a couple of times a week, depending on the volume of cites.

My position on “fair use”: Only the first page of an article will be scanned and images will be deleted after 60 days. This service is for non-commercial, educational purposes only.

Tech Law Advisor: Willful Copyright Infringement/ Summary Judgment

Tech Law Advisor: Willful Copyright Infringement: "Tech Law Advisor

� Man Charged With Stealing Wi-Fi Signal | Main | Blogger Faq on Labor Law �
July 08, 2005
Willful Copyright Infringement

William Patry: Since June 28th, the Second Circuit has handed down two opinions on willful copyright infringement....

Island Software and Computer Service, Inc. v. Microsoft Corp., 2005 U.S. App. LEXIS 12766 (2d Cir. June 28, 2005)

GMA Accessories, Inc. v. Oliva Miller, Inc., 2005 U.S. App. LEXIS 13368 (2d Cir. July 5, 2005).

"

The Clicker: Was Grokster really the important Supreme Court decision? - Engadget - www.engadget.com

The Clicker: Was Grokster really the important Supreme Court decision? - Engadget - www.engadget.comThe Clicker: Was Grokster really the important Supreme Court decision?

Posted Jul 7, 2005, 7:26 PM ET by Peter Rojas
Related entries: Displays, Features, HDTV, Home Entertainment

Every Thursday Stephen Speicher contributes The Clicker, a weekly column on television and technology:

The key to all good magic, as it has been explained to me, is misdirection. The magician must engage in some large, eye-catching gesture that, when all is said and done, is rather meaningless. Meanwhile, under the cover of the aforementioned grandeur, the real work is performed.

For instance: in the early nineties, David Copperfield would, with pomp and glory, make large jets, the Grand Canyon, even the Statue of Liberty disappear into thin air. These, of course, were just the WOW-type distractions he needed to accomplish his real goal, attracting supermodel Claudia Schiffer.

As it turns out – Justice Rehnquist and the rest of his Supreme Court posse are also fans of the ancient art of illusion. When the Supreme Court delivered the recent raft of decisions it deftly used the attention-grabbing, yet rather meaningless, Grokster case to grab the attention of the public. Meanwhile, a second, arguably more important, ruling has quietly solidified Comcast et. al.’s legal classification as an “information service” and not as a “telecommunication” service. In doing so, the Supreme Court has set the stage for cable giants such as Comcast to, with impunity, disallow such competitive services as Vonage, Skype, and even perhaps Akimbo, MovieLink, and a host of IPTV services.

A small, Santa Monica-based Internet company, Brand X Internet LLC, brought suit against the cable industry claiming that, under common carrier regulations, Brand X had a right to deliver its Internet services over the cable giants’ broadband networks. Brand X argued that, just like DSL, cable lines were telecommunication instruments. As such, just like the Bells are forced to open DSL lines to third-party providers, so too should third-party companies be afforded access to the cable infrastructure.

Brand X’s argument was not without basis: In 2000, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals held in AT&T v. the City of Portland that cable modem services were a mixture of both information services and telecommunication services and should be subject to the regulations of both bodies. However, in response to that ruling, the FCC later (2002) issued an opposing statement that cable modem services were information services and that they were not subject to telecommunications regulations. The Brand X case became the Supreme Court’s chance to set the record straight.

In the 6-3 decision delivered by Clarence Thomas, the court re-affirmed the FCC’s classification of cable modem services as information services.

The ruling has caused a lot of speculation about whether the cable industry will use its newly-reaffirmed status to make life difficult for its competitors in the VoIP industry. Under telecommunication regulations, providers must open their networks on non-discriminatory terms. Information services are not bound by the same regulations. Cable companies could engage in port-blocking and other countermeasures used to stop VoIP services from traversing their networks.

What’s even less clear is how the decision muddies the waters with respect to IPTV services. While not yet as developed as VoIP, the emerging IPTV market has just as much to lose. IPTV is also closer to the cable companies bread and butter services. It’s unclear that, without non-discriminatory terms, cable companies would have the proper incentive to allow third-party video services to traverse their networks. Value-add services such as VOD have been at the backbone of nearly all cable battles, and cable companies have fought hard to maintain their monopoly there. It’s unlikely that they wouldn’t at least consider cutting their competition off at the knees.

The matter is further complicated by the dearth of information-service regulations. The FCC has been in a holding pattern with regards to broadband regulations.

The Supreme Court’s decision, according to FCC Chairman Kevin Martin, allows for that to change. Martin said in a statement: “This decision provides much-needed regulatory clarity and a framework for broadband that can be applied to all providers… We can now move forward quickly to finalize regulations that will spur the development of broadband services for all Americans.”

But, until regulations do change, the Brand X decision leaves the Internet in an unusually precarious position. With a) many regions of the country operating under a broadband-access monopoly and b) with access to broadband services becoming more and more important in both communication and entertainment services, the courts just bestowed upon the cable companies a disturbing amount of power.

It’s time for FCC to take some of that power back from the cable companies. It’s time for Martin to enact neutrality regulations. It’s one thing to allow cable companies sole use of their own networks. It’s an entirely different thing to allow them the power to block the competitive services that travel over those networks, and while we’re in limbo that’s what they’ve done.

Daily Kos: Rehnquist tomorrow?

Daily Kos: Rehnquist tomorrow?Rehnquist tomorrow?
by kos
Thu Jul 7th, 2005 at 14:59:24 PDT

The big DC rumor is that Rehnquist will announce his retirement tomorrow between 10-11 a.m. ET.

If that happens, would Bush split the difference -- Gonzales and some winger to pacify the Dobson brigades?

Judith Miller Goes to Jail - New York Times

Judith Miller Goes to Jail - New York TimesJuly 7, 2005
Judith Miller Goes to Jail

This is a proud but awful moment for The New York Times and its employees. One of our reporters, Judith Miller, has decided to accept a jail sentence rather than testify before a grand jury about one of her confidential sources. Ms. Miller has taken a path that will be lonely and painful for her and her family and friends. We wish she did not have to choose it, but we are certain she did the right thing.

She is surrendering her liberty in defense of a greater liberty, granted to a free press by the founding fathers so journalists can work on behalf of the public without fear of regulation or retaliation from any branch of government.

The Press and the Law

Some people - including, sadly, some of our colleagues in the news media - have mistakenly assumed that a reporter and a news organization place themselves above the law by rejecting a court order to testify. Nothing could be further from the truth. When another Times reporter, M. A. Farber, went to jail in 1978 rather than release his confidential notes, he declared, "I have no such right and I seek none."

By accepting her sentence, Ms. Miller bowed to the authority of the court. But she acted in the great tradition of civil disobedience that began with this nation's founding, which holds that the common good is best served in some instances by private citizens who are willing to defy a legal, but unjust or unwise, order.

This tradition stretches from the Boston Tea Party to the Underground Railroad, to the Americans who defied the McCarthy inquisitions and to the civil rights movement. It has called forth ordinary citizens, like Rosa Parks; government officials, like Daniel Ellsberg and Mark Felt; and statesmen, like Martin Luther King. Frequently, it falls to news organizations to uphold this tradition. As Justice William O. Douglas wrote in 1972, "The press has a preferred position in our constitutional scheme, not to enable it to make money, not to set newsmen apart as a favored class, but to bring to fulfillment the public's right to know."

Critics point out that even presidents must bow to the Supreme Court. But presidents are agents of the government, sworn to enforce the law. Journalists are private citizens, and Ms. Miller's actions are faithful to the Constitution. She is defending the right of Americans to get vital information from news organizations that need not fear government retaliation - an imperative defended by the 49 states that recognize a reporter's right to protect sources.

A second reporter facing a possible jail term, Matthew Cooper of Time magazine, agreed yesterday to testify before the grand jury. Last week, Time decided, over Mr. Cooper's protests, to release documents demanded by the judge that revealed his confidential sources. We were deeply disappointed by that decision.

We do not see how a newspaper, magazine or television station can support a reporter's decision to protect confidential sources even if the potential price is lost liberty, and then hand over the notes or documents that make the reporter's sacrifice meaningless. The point of this struggle is to make sure that people with critical information can feel confident that if they speak to a reporter on the condition of anonymity, their identities will be protected. No journalist's promise will be worth much if the employer that stands behind him or her is prepared to undercut such a vow of secrecy.

Protecting a Reporter's Sources

Most readers understand a reporter's need to guarantee confidentiality to a source. Before he went to jail, Mr. Farber told the court that if he gave up documents that revealed the names of the people he had promised anonymity, "I will have given notice that the nation's premier newspaper is no longer available to those men and women who would seek it out - or who would respond to it - to talk freely and without fear."

While The Times has gone to great lengths lately to make sure that the use of anonymous sources is limited, there is no way to eliminate them. The most important articles tend to be the ones that upset people in high places, and many could not be reported if those who risked their jobs or even their liberty to talk to reporters knew that they might be identified the next day. In the larger sense, revealing government wrongdoing advances the rule of law, especially at a time of increased government secrecy.

It is for these reasons that most states have shield laws that protect reporters' rights to conceal their sources. Those laws need to be reviewed and strengthened, even as members of Congress continue to work to pass a federal shield law. But at this moment, there is no statute that protects Judith Miller when she defies a federal trial judge's order to reveal who told her what about Valerie Plame Wilson's identity as an undercover C.I.A. operative.

Ms. Miller understands this perfectly, and she accepts the consequences with full respect for the court. We hope that her sacrifice will alert the nation to the need to protect the basic tools reporters use in doing their most critical work.

To be frank, this is far from an ideal case. We would not have wanted our reporter to give up her liberty over a situation whose details are so complicated and muddy. But history is very seldom kind enough to provide the ideal venue for a principled stand. Ms. Miller is going to jail over an article that she never wrote, yet she has been unwavering in her determination to protect the people with whom she had spoken on the promise of confidentiality.

The Plame Story

The case involves an article by the syndicated columnist Robert Novak, who revealed that Joseph Wilson, a retired career diplomat, was married to an undercover C.I.A. officer Mr. Novak identified by using her maiden name, Valerie Plame. Mr. Wilson had been asked by the C.I.A. to investigate whether Saddam Hussein in Iraq was trying to buy uranium from Niger that could be used for making nuclear weapons. Mr. Wilson found no evidence of that, and he later wrote an Op-Ed article for The Times saying he believed that the Bush administration had misrepresented the facts.

It seemed very possible that someone at the White House had told Mr. Novak about Ms. Plame to undermine Mr. Wilson's credibility and send a chilling signal to other officials who might be inclined to speak out against the administration's Iraq policy. At the time, this page said that if those were indeed the circumstances, the leak had been "an egregious abuse of power." We urged the Justice Department to investigate. But we warned then that the inquiry should not degenerate into an attempt to compel journalists to reveal their sources.

We mainly had Mr. Novak in mind then, but Mr. Novak remains both free and mum about what he has or has not told the grand jury looking into the leak. Like almost everyone, we are baffled by his public posture. All we know now is that Mr. Novak - who early on expressed the opinion that no journalists who bowed to court pressure to betray sources could hold up their heads in Washington - has offered no public support to the colleague who is going to jail while he remains at liberty.

Ms. Miller did not write an article about Ms. Plame, but the prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, wants to know whether anyone in government told her about Mr. Wilson's wife and her secret job. The inquiry has been conducted with such secrecy that it is hard to know exactly what Mr. Fitzgerald thinks Ms. Miller can tell him, or what argument he offered to convince the court that his need to hear her testimony outweighs the First Amendment.

What we do know is that if Ms. Miller testifies, it may be immeasurably harder in the future to persuade a frightened government employee to talk about malfeasance in high places, or a worried worker to reveal corporate crimes. The shroud of secrecy thrown over this case by the prosecutor and the judge, an egregious denial of due process, only makes it more urgent to take a stand.

Mr. Fitzgerald drove that point home chillingly when he said the authorities "can't have 50,000 journalists" making decisions about whether to reveal sources' names and that the government had a right to impose its judgment. But that's not what the founders had in mind in writing the First Amendment. In 1971, our colleague James Reston cited James Madison's admonition about a free press in explaining why The Times had first defied the Nixon administration's demand to stop publishing the Pentagon Papers and then fought a court's order to cease publication. "Among those principles deemed sacred in America," Madison wrote, "among those sacred rights considered as forming the bulwark of their liberty, which the government contemplates with awful reverence and would approach only with the most cautious circumspection, there is no one of which the importance is more deeply impressed on the public mind than the liberty of the press."

Mr. Fitzgerald's attempts to interfere with the rights of a free press while refusing to disclose his reasons for doing so, when he can't even say whether a crime has been committed, have exhibited neither reverence nor cautious circumspection. It would compound the tragedy if his actions emboldened more prosecutors to trample on a free press.

Our Bottom Line

Responsible journalists recognize that press freedoms are not absolute and must be exercised responsibly. This newspaper will not, for example, print the details of American troop movements in advance of a battle, because publication would endanger lives and national security. But these limits cannot be dictated by the whim of a branch of government, especially behind a screen of secrecy.

Indeed, the founders warned against any attempt to have the government set limits on a free press, under any conditions. "However desirable those measures might be which might correct without enslaving the press, they have never yet been devised in America," Madison wrote.

Journalists talk about these issues a great deal, and they can seem abstract. The test comes when a colleague is being marched off to jail for doing nothing more than the job our readers expected of her, and of the rest of us. The Times has been in these fights before, beginning in 1857, when a journalist named J. W. Simonton wrote an editorial about bribery in Congress and was held in contempt by the House of Representatives for 19 days when he refused to reveal his sources. In the end, Mr. Simonton kept faith, and the corrupt congressmen resigned. All of our battles have not had equally happy endings. But each time, whether we win or we lose, we remain convinced that the public wins in the long run and that what is at stake is nothing less than our society's perpetual bottom line: the citizens control the government in a democracy.

We stand with Ms. Miller and thank her for taking on that fight for the rest of us.

Ipaq HQ Forums - Watch Who's WiFi You Use -- It Could Be A Felony

Ipaq HQ Forums - Watch Who's WiFi You Use -- It Could Be A FelonyWatch Who's WiFi You Use -- It Could Be A Felony
Richard Dinon of St Petersburg, Florida noticed a guy sitting in an SUV outside his home using a laptop computer. Dinon figured-out that the guy in the SUV, Benjamin Smith, III, was using Dinon's his home's open and unprotected WiFi network -- an unauthorized use no less.

Rather than work it out between them -- like walking up to the door and asking permission or knocking on the SUV window and asking the guy to quit using the network, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement was involved and Smith was arrested. He is facing third-degree felony charges of unauthorized access to a computer network.

Locating and using an open network is a fairly common practice. Sure, some people do so to do bad things, but the vast majority people who access someone else's WiFi network do so to get access to the Internet for relatively harmless reasons such as sending and receiving email, checking movie times or getting updated on the day's news.

It's unclear as to what Mr. Smith was doing with his unauthorized connection -- Florida Prosecutors have declined to comment and Smith hasn't said publicly. What is clear is that whether innocent or nefarious in nature, unauthorized use is against the law in many places.

Staying Out Of Jail With WiFi Access:

1. Ask permission -- getting it in writing is best.
2. No means no -- like in many other areas of life.
3. Yes today doesn't necessarily mean yes tomorrow -- always ask.
4. Look for posted signs advertising FREE WiFi access -- A sign is always a good sign.
5. Pave the way for others -- suggest a sign authorizing FREE open WiFi access to businesses and homes that open their access points to the public.
6. Stay away from Richard Dinon house in St Petersburg, Florida -- he's apparently not open to sharing his open and unprotected WiFi access point with others.
7. When in doubt, don't! -- Asking forgiveness isn't as good as asking permission when someone with handcuffs and a badge is reading you your rights.
8. Pay to play -- just pay for a hotspot subscription and get it over with.
9. Look before you go -- research FREE & legal access points before you hit the road (or with Google Mobile while on the road.) An ounce of prevention, yada, yada, yada...

If you frequently piggy-back on other people's open WiFi access points -- go and sin no more -- or risk fines, fees and felony charges that will FAR outweigh a good T-Mobile Hotspot subscription fee.

Missing college student found in jail | ajc.com

Missing college student found in jail | ajc.comMissing college student found in jail

> By RHONDA COOK
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
> Published on: 07/06/05

A Clark Atlanta University student was located Tuesday in the city jail, where she had been held since June 26 when she was picked up for disturbing the peace.

Theresa Lewis received a call from a police missing persons detective with the news that Chasity Lewis had been located. He did not tell her, however, that her daughter had been jailed for disturbing the peace.

The missing young woman was being held under the name "Jane Doe," because she refused to tell police her name.

Shortly after learning that her daughter was safe, Theresa Lewis learned from a reporter that she was being held at the city jail. "I am so angry," Lewis said Tuesday night from her home outside San Francisco.

During the 10 days she searched for her only child, Lewis said she had called the city jail, Atlanta Police headquarters and the police zone office near her daughter's home two times each. She was told that police had no one fitting her daughter's description.

Lewis said she is relieved that Chasity was found unharmed but is confused about what prompted her "bizarre" behavior. She said she will fly back to Atlanta to see about her daughter.

"What's happened to her?" Lewis asked. "Did she have a nervous breakdown? Is she sick? I don't know what I'm going to see when I get there [Atlanta]. What happened to her since the last time I saw her?"

A detective put Chasity on the telephone with Lewis on Tuesday, but he didn't explain how she was located. Lewis said the detective promised to "keep her with him" until Lewis can return to Atlanta. The mother was working on travel plans Tuesday evening.

"I almost had a heart attack when I heard her voice," Lewis said just minutes after talking with her daughter. "He put her on the phone and asked me to identify her. It was her. She said, 'Hey, Mom.' She didn't tell me where she had been."

Police spokesman Sgt. John Quigley said "someone recognized" Chasity's picture that was printed in the AJC on Tuesday. She had been arrested for "breach of the peace" on the morning of June 26 on Hopkins Street, about six miles from her home in southwest Atlanta.

According to the police report, neighbors had complained to police that Chasity was walking back and forth along the street, "screaming and yelling out loud in the neighborhood."

Theresa Lewis filed a missing persons report early Saturday — six days after Chasity had been arrested — because she had lost contact with her daughter.

They ordinarily talked on the telephone at least once a day, but the last time they spoke before the disappearance was June 22. Chasity was scheduled to fly to San Francisco to visit her mother on June 28 but never boarded the plane.

Lewis' follow-up calls to check on her daughter were not answered. On June 26, Lewis asked an Atlanta relative to go by Chasity's duplex in southwest Atlanta to check on her. She wasn't there.

Raising the family's concern, the relative found that she had left in the house "all of her things. Her ATM card. Her keys. Her passport. Her cellphone. Her purse," Lewis said. There was an open bottle of wine spritzer, and it looked as if she had taken only one sip from it.

All that was out of character, Theresa Lewis had said, which prompted her to board a flight to Atlanta Friday night.

But the mother had to fly back to California on Monday evening because she was a juror on an ongoing trial. She said Tuesday evening that she would take the next flight to Atlanta she could get.

Chastity Lewis and her mother 

CBS 46 Atlanta - CAU Student Disappears Before Trip Home

CBS 46 Atlanta - CAU Student Disappears Before Trip HomeCAU Student Disappears Before Trip Home
Jul 5, 2005, 5:05 PM

ATLANTA (AP) -- Police are looking into the disappearance of a Clark Atlanta University student who has been missing for about a week.

Chasity Nicole Lewis, 22, was supposed to have flown home to San Francisco for the summer last Tuesday. But she didn't make the flight that day, said her mother, Theresa Lewis.

Theresa Lewis called a friend who lives in the area to go to her daughter's rented house near Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport and then to police, who found the house locked. With the landlord out of town, a cousin, David Whatley, was persuaded to climb through a window into the house last Tuesday.

Theresa Lewis said all of Chasity Lewis' things were found inside, including her ATM card, keys, cell phone and her purse. The bed was unmade, the air conditioner was on and a fan was running. Also, her dog was outside the fence.

"It looked like she just vanished," said Whatley, who had had lunch with Chasity Lewis the day before. "I looked the whole house over and nobody was there."

A missing persons report was filed Saturday. Atlanta police spokesman Sgt. John Quigley said that what got their attention is that Chasity Lewis bought a ticket to fly home.

"That's a reason to be concerned," Quigley said.

Theresa Lewis said she last spoke to her daughter June 22 but that she sounded "down, not her bubbly self." After that, calls to her daughter were not answered.

Theresa Lewis said she has also called nearly every number in her daughter's cell phone directory but no one has seen her.

"I don't know if she snapped or lost her mind or where she is," Theresa Lewis said. "Something has happened. It was unlike her not to communicate. We talk every day."

Presidents, Picking Justices, Can Have Backfires - New York Times

Presidents, Picking Justices, Can Have Backfires - New York TimesJuly 5, 2005
Presidents, Picking Justices, Can Have Backfires
By TODD S. PURDUM

WASHINGTON, July 4 - In July 1902, confident that he had found a judge opposed to "big railroad men and other members of large corporations," Theodore Roosevelt named Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. as his first appointee to the Supreme Court, delighted with a choice that their fellow Republican, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, called "our kind right through."

Twenty months (and many convivial dinners at the White House) later, in the middle of an election year, Justice Holmes voted against his progressive president in the biggest railroad trust-busting case of the time, United States v. Northern Securities. "I could carve out of a banana a judge with more backbone than that," an enraged Roosevelt declared.

As President Bush prepares to fill a vacancy that conservatives hope (and liberals fear) could shape the Supreme Court for a generation, he faces a daunting historical reality: presidents don't always get what they bargain for when they grant even seemingly close allies lifetime tenure on a fiercely independent institution, where the hot-button issues of the future are hard to predict.

"The biggest damn fool mistake I ever made," Dwight D. Eisenhower said of his appointment of Chief Justice Earl Warren, who discomfited him with the Brown v. Board of Education ruling ordering desegregation of public schools, and other liberal opinions. Harry S. Truman was even more scathing about Justice Tom C. Clark, a Truman appointee who voted against his 1952 seizure of the steel industry to avert a strike.

"It isn't so much that he's a bad man," Truman later told the oral historian Merle Miller. "It's just that he's such a dumb son of a bitch."

It is precisely to guard against such surprises - and the likes of more recent Republican appointees who have disappointed their party's conservative wing, from the retiring Justice Sandra Day O'Connor to David H. Souter and Anthony M. Kennedy - that many conservatives are now urging Mr. Bush to pick an established jurist or legal scholar with a defined philosophy, clear paper trail and unimpeachable credentials on questions from abortion to property rights.

"He's not guaranteed of getting what he's hoping for, but he can maximize his chances," said Edward Lazarus, a former clerk to Justice Harry A. Blackmun and the author of "Closed Chambers: The Rise, Fall and Future of the Modern Supreme Court." "The way to maximize your chances is to pick someone who is really deeply ideological and has spent a long time thinking about the issues, either a judge or a scholar or someone with a long track record and well-formed ideology."

Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, whom Mr. Bush has cited as his models, have ruled predictably - and often in lockstep. Many of the federal appellate court judges believed to be among the candidates Mr. Bush is now considering would appear to fit the same mold.

But even one of the conservative movement's favorite candidates, Judge J. Michael Luttig of the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in Richmond, Va., agreed to invalidate a Virginia ban on a form of abortion that the law calls partial birth - a restriction he had previously upheld - after the Supreme Court struck down a similar law in Nebraska. As a member of the Supreme Court, would he feel even more bound by its precedents and traditions?

No less an expert than Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist suggested in a speech more than 20 years ago that any president's ability to pack the court with like-minded justices is inherently limited. While a new justice might feel "strongly loyal to the president who appointed him," Justice Rehnquist told a Minnesota law school audience in 1984, "institutional pressures" within the court itself tend to "weaken and diffuse the outside loyalties of any new appointee."

He added that the court "is an institution far more dominated by centrifugal forces, pushing towards individuality and independence, than it is by centripetal forces pulling for hierarchical ordering and institutional unity."

Presidents as far back as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison have been surprised or disappointed by decisions of their appointees to the court. But perhaps the most famous example was Abraham Lincoln, who named his secretary of the treasury, Salmon P. Chase, as chief justice primarily to ensure that the court would uphold the constitutionality of the legislation by which the federal government had financed the Civil War, and which Mr. Chase had helped draft.

"We cannot ask a man what he will do, and if we should, and he should answer us, we would despise him," Lincoln said, by way of explaining his choice. "Therefore we must take a man whose opinions are known."

Perhaps in one of his perennially unsuccessful efforts to win the Democratic presidential nomination, Justice Chase wrote the court's opinion finding the legislation unconstitutional. But the decision was also, Chief Justice Rehnquist noted, "a textbook example of the proposition that one may look at a legal question differently as a judge than one did as a member of the executive branch."

It is just that reality that so concerns some conservatives about the prospect that Mr. Bush might name Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, whose views on issues like abortion are less known. That is why Republican and Democratic senators are already jousting pre-emptively over just how detailed their questioning about any nominee's views on issues should be. To the impassioned advocates on both sides, every detail might be telling.

More than 60 years ago, Zechariah Chafee, a leading legal historian, suggested that the best place to look for signs of a nominee's judicial attitudes was "not in his file of clients or in his safe-deposit box but at the books in his private library at home."

While some legal scholars like Laurence H. Tribe of Harvard have argued that presidents do have enormous power to influence the Supreme Court, others remain skeptical. Richard D. Friedman, of the University of Michigan Law School, said that "the dynamic of the court can be very important, the nine justices speaking to each other and, very importantly, to their clerks."

Harlan Fiske Stone, appointed by Calvin Coolidge, whom he had served as attorney general, eventually came under the influence of Justices Holmes and Louis D. Brandeis "and moved quite steadily left," Professor Friedman said.

The court's slow turnover also all but guarantees that presidents will have limited vacancies to fill. Since 1869, when the number of seats was set at nine, only William Howard Taft and Franklin D. Roosevelt managed to name a majority of justices in a single term, and only Dwight D. Eisenhower did so over the course of two terms. Moreover, Franklin Roosevelt's appointees were nothing like a bloc, and at least one of them, Felix Frankfurter, a prominent liberal law professor, proved surprisingly conservative on the bench.

"I just think what Mr. Justice Frankfurter did when he was a professor and private citizen overlooks the fact that once he got on the court, the job is completely different," said William T. Coleman Jr., who clerked for him in 1948-49 and went on to become Gerald R. Ford's secretary of transportation. He noted that when Mr. Ford appointed Justice John Paul Stevens, who now often votes with the two Democratic appointees on the court, "we read every opinion he'd ever written, but it's really the quality of the person you look for."

"President Ford told me just three weeks ago that one of the decisions he was proudest of was his appointment of Mr. Justice Stevens," Mr. Coleman added. "And that doesn't mean he has decided every case the way President Ford wanted."

Technology & Marketing Law Blog: Grokster Supreme Court Ruling

Technology & Marketing Law Blog: Grokster Supreme Court Rulingechnology & Marketing Law Blog

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June 27, 2005
Grokster Supreme Court Ruling

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd, Case No. 04-480. (US Supreme Court June 27, 2005).

What Happened

The Supreme Court unanimously reversed the Ninth Circuit’s upholding of summary judgment for the defendants, sending the case back to the lower courts to either consider MGM’s motions of summary judgment (which the court signals should be granted) or to conduct a trial.

There are three opinions: (1) the majority opinion, joined by all justices (9-0), finding that summary judgment for the defendants was inappropriate because MGM showed enough facts of “inducement” to defeat summary judgment, (2) a Ginsburg concurrence (representing the opinion of 3 justices), where she says that the defendants should lose under Sony, and (3) a Breyer concurrence (representing the opinion of 3 justices), saying that the defendants should have qualified under Sony.

Tech Law Advisor: Concurring Opinions in MGM v. GROKSTER

Tech Law Advisor: Concurring Opinions in MGM v. GROKSTERConcurring Opinions in MGM v. GROKSTER
SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES No. 04–480

METRO-GOLDWYN-MAYER STUDIOS INC., ET AL.,
PETITIONERS v. GROKSTER, LTD., ET AL.

ON WRIT OF CERTIORARI TO THE UNITED STATES COURT OF
APPEALS FOR THE NINTH CIRCUIT

[June 27, 2005]

Justice Ginsburg, with whom The Chief Justice and Justice Kennedy join, concurring

I concur in the Court's decision, which vacates in full the judgment of the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, ante, at 24, and write separately to clarify why I conclude that the Court of Appeals misperceived, and hence misapplied, our holding in Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc., 464 U. S. 417 (1984). There is here at least a "genuine issue as to [a] material fact," Fed. Rule Civ. Proc. 56(c), on the liability of Grokster or StreamCast, not only for actively inducing copyright infringement, but also or alternatively, based on the distribution of their software products, for contributory copyright infringement. On neither score was summary judgment for Grokster and StreamCast warranted.

At bottom, however labeled, the question in this case is whether Grokster and StreamCast are liable for the direct infringing acts of others. Liability under our jurisprudence may be predicated on actively encouraging (or inducing) infringement through specific acts (as the Court's opinion develops) or on distributing a product distributees use to infringe copyrights, if the product is not capable of "substantial" or "commercially significant" noninfringing uses. Sony, 464 U. S., at 442; see also 3 M. Nimmer & D. Nimmer, Nimmer on Copyright §12.04[A][2] (2005). While the two categories overlap, they capture different culpable behavior. Long coexisting, both are now codified in patent law. Compare 35 U. S. C. §271(b) (active inducement liability), with §271(c) (contributory liability for distribution of a product not "suitable for substantial noninfringing use").