Peter Scheer

BY PETER SCHEER—The First Amendment has lost a good friend. Raymond Pryke, a free speech provocateur, agitator for open and accountable government, and patron of First Amendment scholarship and advocacy, died February 7 in the southern California high-desert community of Hesperia, where he lived and worked for many years. He was 91. A British subject, the son of an Anglican minister, Ray discovered America in the early years of World War II, when he was

BY PETER SCHEER–Attorney General Eric Holder’s relationship with the press over the last six years has been contentious, to put it mildly. Holder and his lieutenants in the Justice Department have been zealous in their pursuit of suspected leakers of national security information–and those investigations inevitably led to battles with journalists over information about their confidential sources. But as Holder gets ready to depart government–his successor, Loretta Lynch, has been nominated and is awaiting confirmation—he

BY PETER SCHEER–The terrorist attacks in Paris, for all their horror and barbarity, are a clarifying event. Freedom of speech, we can all see, is the ultimate soft target, as vulnerable as it is precious. The terrorists came first for journalists, selecting the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo to rid the world of satire, irreverence and Western cultural excess. Hours later, revealing their true historical and ideological heritage, they came for the Jews. Deja vu of

BY PETER SCHEER–Despite the dysfunction in Washington, Congress occasionally surprises with a modest piece of legislation that points the way for California and many other states. So it is with a 2014 Federal Records Act amendment which addresses this question: Suppose a federal employee, using his own personal text or email account, sends a message that is clearly about government business? The Federal Records Act amendment, at section 2911, says that the employee is now