“A Maryland newspaper.”

Really, The Wall Street Journal? You write about news The Daily Record broke, and you credit “a Maryland newspaper”?

What, your story ran over by a line so you had to cut out our name? Or maybe all your fact-checkers had the day off?

Or were you trying to be cute, since today’s article — “Anonymous Ladies and Gentlemen of the jury” — is, after all, about withholding names?

In the article, reporters Ashby Jones and Nathan Koppel use the trial of former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich as a news hook to discuss the practice of withholding the names and addresses of jurors.

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My colleague Brendan Kearney’s article Monday about a female paramedic’s allegation she was blackballed by the city of Crisfield’s volunteer fire department because of her sex hearkens to a time, hopefully bygone, when the ol’ boys’ network was alive and well and Myra Bradwell wanted to be a lawyer.

Does the name ring a bell? If not, think back to your Constitutional Law class.

In the late 1800s, Illinois denied Bradwell a license to practice law — and it wasn’t because she failed the bar exam.

So she did what any self-respecting, should-have-been-admitted lawyer would do: She took her case all the way to the Supreme Court.

Her attorney argued that Illinois had violated Bradwell’s constitutional rights under the Privileges and Immunities Clause by not giving her the license she had earned and deserved.*

But it was Justice Joseph P. Bradley who, in a concurring opinion, gave a spirited defense of good ol’ boy networks when he characterized Bradwell’s case as bigger than the Constitution:

“[T]he civil law, as well as nature herself, has always recognized a wide difference in the respective spheres and destinies of man and woman. Man is, or should be, woman’s protector and defender. The natural and proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex evidently unfits it for many of the occupations of civil life…. It is true that many women are unmarried and not affected by any of the duties, complications, and incapacities arising out of the married state, but these are exceptions to the general rule. The paramount destiny and mission of woman are to fulfill the noble and benign offices of wife and mother. This is the law of the Creator. And the rules of civil society must be adapted to the general constitution of things, and cannot be based on exceptional cases.”

*It would be another 100 years before anyone — read: then-attorney Ruth Bader Ginsburg — would successfully argue that gender discrimination by a governmental body violates the Equal Protection Clause.

Happy Monday! Here are a few law links to start your week:

• Jessamy challenger Gregg Bernstein tells Investigative Voice that his opponent doesn’t have a good relationship with police and hasn’t insisted that her prosecutors come to court prepared for trial. Bernstein also criticizes Jessamy’s practice of barring prosecutors from calling certain officers as witnesses because of perceived integrity issues.
• “Obviously, he wants to be LeBron James’ father,” Ron Miller writes of the Washington lawyer who is claiming paternity of LeBron James. “Let’s say he is the father. Is it worth admitting you committed statutory rape and that you were basically a deadbeat dad until your kid became an NBA mega star?”
• Why are college graduates applying to and choosing to attend law school in such great numbers, even as the legal sector shrinks?
• John Stossel is ridiculously out of touch on products liability issues, writes The Pop Tort.
• “Pill mills,” in which “drug dealer[s] with… white coat[s] on” prescribe pain meds to addicts and dealers with abandon, are a scourge in South Florida.
• Please do yourself a favor and watch this collection of the worst lawyer ads out there. Watch this one too, which Walter Olson at Overlawyered feels was wrongly left out.