This could land you in prison in #AZ via @berkitron https://t.co/BICDqe4XUa — ACLU National (@ACLU) September 23, 2014 That's a tweet from the American Civil Liberties Union. The link within it is to a blog post written by Lee Rowland (@berkitron), Staff Attorney, ACLU Speech, Privacy & Technology Project. Sharing that image would be "disclos[ing] an image of another, identifiable person, whose intimate parts are exposed …

When I argued Ex Parte Lo at the Court of Criminal Appeals, I used section 33.021(c), the "actual solicitation" portion of Texas's Online Solicitation of a Minor statute as an example of a constitutional limitation on speech. I hadn't given section 33.021(c) a lot of close attention, but it talked about "soliciting" a "minor" for sex, and soliciting a minor for sex is generally recognized as unprotected

IS UNLAWFUL TO INTENTIONALLY DISCLOSE, DISPLAY, DISTRIBUTE, PUBLISH, ADVERTISE OR OFFER A PHOTOGRAPH, VIDEOTAPE, FILM OR DIGITAL RECORDING OF ANOTHER PERSON IN A STATE OF NUDITY OR ENGAGED IN SPECIFIC SEXUAL ACTIVITIES IF THE PERSON KNOWS OR SHOULD HAVE KNOWN THAT THE DEPICTED PERSON HAS NOT CONSENTED TO THE DISCLOSURE Ariz. Rev. Stat. § 13-142 (effective 2014). (b) A person commits an offense if the person: (1)

Scott Greenfield wants the backstory? Here's the backstory. I asked the Collin County Sheriff's Office for Sergeant (now Investigator) Christopher M. Meehan's personnel file. Robert J. Davis, representing the Sheriff's Office, requested an opinion from the Attorney General allowing the Sheriff's Office to withhold the bulk of the cop's personnel file for various reasons, ranging from the specious ("There is certainly no information contained in the personnel

[A]ll trial lawyers who make improper arguments…have no business lamenting the public’s low perception of lawyers. They need only look in the mirror. I wasn't even very hard on him: I just republished part of a dissenting opinion criticizing a closing argument that Justin Keiter had made, and connected Keiter's name with it. Keiter took the criticism hard. I was riding on the elevator today when Justin

There are dangerous pedophiles in the world, and some of them are civil lawyers. But that is no reason to assume that Dallas lawyer Robert J. Davis is either a pedophile or dangerous. Because assuming that a civil lawyer like Robert J. Davis is a dangerous pedophile would be like assuming that a criminal lawyer is in cahoots with dangerous drug dealers. And I wouldn't do that.

When the media need an opinion on some legal issue, often they will go to the nearest law school. The reasoning—which is sound in theory—is that if a professor lists, say, "immigration law" as one of her subjects, then she will be an expert in the subject.Most law professors, who live lives of quiet desperation writing academic articles that few will ever read, are happy to opine

A prosecutor asked me recently whether I might be willing to work with legislators to write a revenge-porn statute that would pass First Amendment muster. I replied that I would, but that I didn't think  it could be done. The United State's Supreme Court's modern approach to First Amendment challenges to content-based penal restrictions of speech, as applied in U.S. v. Stevens and U.S. v. Alvarez, is

A defendant should never "plea guilty" because "plea" is not a verb. The infinitive is "to plead." The past tense is "pleaded" or "pled." Which you use is a matter of personal preference, either yours or your readers', but the Oxford English Dictionary and Garner's Modern American Usage both prefer "pleaded." A case should not under any circumstances "be plead," but it might be pled (or pleaded)

People don't like being manipulated or controlled by other people. They will bridle and resist if they think you are trying to convince them to do something. The harder they think you are trying, the harder they will push back. But trial advocacy is the practice of convincing people to do things. So ideally, trial advocacy should be transparent. At the end of the case the jurors,