Peter Scheer

PETER SCHEER– FAC has joined a lawsuit against Marin County concerning an environmental dispute over  Coho salmon. Environmentalist David Schnapf filed the CPRA suit last year, seeking records about the county’s adoption of an ordinance mandated by a countywide conservation plan. Although the 2013 measure was supposed to protect salmon flows, Schnapf and other critics say it is more protective of property owners than endangered fish. The controversial ordinance never took effect because of an

BY PETER SCHEER—Any rational person viewing even a portion of an ISIS snuff video has wondered: Do these maniacs really think that they can win popular support for their cause through grisly online depictions of immolations and mass beheadings?  Don’t they realize that the vast, vast majority of viewers are sickened by these images and want absolutely nothing to do with the (so-called) Islamic State? The answer, I fear, is that ISIS’s leaders know what

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