The Reporter’s Privilege Goes Incognito in Wisconsin

Few professional groups in our society are less popular than journalists, so it’s a rare occasion when legislators – obsessed as they are with reelection – take actions specifically designed to help the press.

The Wisconsin Legislature showed some of that political bravery this month when it passed the state’s first reporter’s shield law (although some members still seem a little sheepish about it). The new statute, signed into law by Gov. Jim Doyle on May 20, gives “news persons” protection from certain subpoenas seeking their testimony, work products or confidential information, including the identities of their unnamed sources.

Journalists have been fighting for these statutory protections since 1972 when the U.S. Supreme Court refused to recognize a First Amendment reporter’s privilege in Branzburg v. Hayes. Wisconsin is now the 39th state to have responded by adopting concrete statutory protections for journalists.

As anchorman Ron Burgundy might say, this is kind of a big deal. But so far the response has been muted: no significant news coverage, no pubic outcry, no dancing in the streets.

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A Captivating New Paper

Paul Secunda argues in a new paper on SSRN that the National Labor Relations Act should be interpreted to prohibit “captive audience meetings.”  Employers require employee attendance at such meetings in order to communicate anti-union messages.  Paul has written interestingly about captive audience meetings from a number of perspectives (see, e.g., here).  In the new paper, he critically examines NLRB precedent that approves of such meetings.

Entitled “The Contemporary ‘Fist Inside the Velvet Glove’ — Employer Captive Audience Meetings Under the NLRA,” the paper will be published in a symposium issue of the Florida International University Law Review devoted to the NLRB.  The abstract appears after the jump. 

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The Second Amendment and the Public’s Health

Last November, Michael O’Hear offered an interesting post on whether a Seventh Circuit decision that developed a new test for Second Amendment claims would breath life into the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, 128 S. Ct. 2783 (2008), which for the first time interpreted the Second Amendment as conferring an individual right to possess and use firearms. Two years after Heller was handed down, I have been wondering about its consequences, too, in the context of public health policy.

Historically, gun-related violence and accidents were not viewed as a public health matter. Rather, gun violence was considered a matter for the criminal justice system; gun-related suicides were seen as a concern for the mental health system; and gun accidents were viewed as best handled by educational safety courses. Perceptions changed, however, with the advent of the field of injury prevention in the 1970s. When all gun violence and accidents were considered together, guns were found to be the second-leading cause of injury deaths in the U.S. 

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