The CEO of the Associated Press said the government’s unprecedented actions to seize phone records of reporters from the news organization was both unconstitutional and has had a chilling effect on sources. The president and chief executive officer of The Associated Press on Sunday called the government’s secret seizure of two months of reporters’ phone [...]

A federal court has temporarily blocked the Obama Administration’s contraceptive mandate for one Colorado air conditioning company, in the first of what promises to be several legal fights over the regulation, ultimately winding up at the Supreme Court. The ruling comes in a case brought by Hercules Industries, which argued that they should not have [...]

I’ve heard legal theories that the city of New York has the right to impose restrictions on the time, place and manner of the exercise of free speech. This will obviously play out in a court of law. I don’t know how anyone can reasonably look at the laws and say that the wholesale shutdown [...]

I hope somebody does a Michael Bloomberg approval poll sometime soon, because from this vantage point, he’s squandering whatever’s left of his credibility: Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, speaking Monday as Occupy Wall Street protesters celebrated the passage of a month encamped in Zuccotti Park, said he was trying to strike a balance between protecting protesters’ [...]

Ian Milhiser has done a great service with a review of the Supreme Court’s session, showing that the court under John Roberts has become a powerful champion of the big guy over the little guy, the powerful over the people, and the free speech rights of corporations. But perhaps the scariest manifestation of this was [...]

The Supreme Court, reflecting their continuing unwinding of all campaign finance laws in America, today struck down a decades-old Arizona law that enables public financing for legislative elections. The decision was predictably 5-4, with the court’s conservative wing arguing that the Clean Elections Law, which provides matching funds for challengers who accept public money, “substantially [...]

Twenty members of the Columbia School of Journalism have written a letter to President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder expressing their opposition to charging Wikileaks founder Julian Assange with criminal counts for leaking a cache of classified State Department cables. Some of the professors who signed the statement don’t agree with Assange or his [...]

After a week in the prison cell which once held Oscar Wilde, Julian Assange has been released in Britain on $310,000 bail, as the case over his extradition to Sweden on sex-related charges continues. In a 10-minute telephone conversation his mother, the newspaper said, Mrs. Assange declared: “My convictions are unfaltering. I remain true to [...]

That’s New York Times editor Bill Keller, explaining how his organization checked with the US government before publishing any of the Wikileaks State Department cables, redacted all sensitive names from publication at the recommendation of the government, and basically did everything they could in advance to clear the release with the Administration. Carne Ross, the [...]

Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, has been arrested in London on a Swedish sex crime charge. The action comes a week and a half after the release of State Department cables to news organizations and via the Internet, which will continue according to the Wikileaks Twitter feed. “Today’s actions against our editor-in-chief Julian Assange [...]

Today’s Wikileaks release of key facilities vital to US national security is a bit less than meets the eye once you delve into it. However, it does send a kind of warning signal to the world that Julian Assange means business when he dsecribes “poison pill” information that will be released upon his arrest or [...]