First Amendment News

The Los Angeles Times reports today that a federal grand jury in Los Angeles has begun issuing subpoenas in a case involving a Missouri teenager, Megan Meier, who hanged herself after being rejected by a person she thought was a 16-year-old boy, “Josh Evans,” whom she had met on MySpace. According to the Times, Josh Evans was actually Lori Drew, a neighbor who befriended Megan by pretending, online, to be 16-year-old Evans. The LA Times

The Temecula City Council has backed away from a controversial proposal to single out one news organization–the Press Enterprise–for restricted access to city officials. Unhappy with the Press Enterprise’s news coverage, two council members had asked the full council to approve a policy requiring that inquiries from the newspaper be put in writing to council members and administrators, who would respond only in writing. Other news media would remain free, under the proposal, to report

PASADENA – Brought into focus for a few hours each year to a global audience, a stretch of Colorado Boulevard became for some last week a testing ground for the First Amendment. As visibility-seeking protesters interacted with law-enforcement personnel tasked with keeping the Rose Parade safe, some complained that the line blurred between security and censorship. “The Rose Parade presents a really significant dilemma for Pasadena in that we do have First Amendment rights,” said

The New York Daily News reports that lawyers for the San Francisco Chronicle filed a brief last Friday asking the federal government to explain why it shared what it had deemed secret information with the man probing steroids in baseball. The Chronicle reportedly said the federal government may have violated its own sealing order when it gave former Sen. Majority Leader George Mitchell permission to publish the names of players accused of using performance-enhancing drugs.

The Recorder By Scott Graham December 20, 2007 Documents filed with a court in civil litigation are not automatically available to the public, the Sixth District Court of Appeal has ruled Wednesday in a case brought by Bloomberg News, The Recorder newspaper and the San Francisco Chronicle. A unanimous panel led by Justice Wendy Duffy ruled that a trial judge had erred by unsealing e-mails, spreadsheets and other discovery appended to a shareholder complaint in