Peter Scheer

The Justice Department has been getting hammered in (and by) the press over a leak investigation involving the seizure of emails from the personal gmail account of James Rosen, a reporter for Fox News. The criticism has focused on the revelation, contained in a 2010 FBI affidavit used to obtain a search warrant, that the government then viewed Rosen not merely as a witness, someone who possessed evidence about the source of a national security

The real outrage about the Justice Department’s use of secret subpoenas for the phone records of Associated Press journalists is that, based on the information that has surfaced to date, it was probably legal. Under federal law the Justice Department needs only a subpoena–a piece of paper that a US Attorney generates unilaterally, without any court authorization–to obtain from phone companies and other service providers the call logs for customers. This includes essentially the same

If you believe public corporations should be required to disclose their political campaign contributions, there’s a simple solution. It is the solution that is being considered by the Securities Exchange Commission in Washington– namely, to treat contributions as material transactions and, on that basis, require that they be disclosed, like profits, losses, lawsuits, etc, in periodic public filings with the SEC. This regulatory solution to a highly divisive issue has drawn the scorn of conservative

Public employee unions face a new, and mortal, threat. It’s not the unfunded liability of union pension plans or municipal governments’ resort to bankruptcy to void union contracts. It’s not state initiatives to restrict collective bargaining rights or other outpourings of voter resentment. No, the new existential threat facing government unions comes from . . . the First Amendment. In a scarcely-noticed lawsuit filed Monday in federal district court in Los Angeles, a conservative nonprofit,

California’s anti-SLAPP law, which provides an effective shield to media organizations sued for libel, invasion of privacy and the like, could soon be a lot less effective if Ninth Circuit Chief Judge Alex Kozinski, ordinarily a strong advocate for First Amendment protections, has his way. In a concurring opinion to a recent decision, Judge Kozinski argued that the appeals court had made a “big mistake” by ruling fourteen years ago that the anti-SLAPP law, with