I wrote last week about the defamation lawsuit Rick Reinhardt filed Julie Ensor, his rival for clerk of the Baltimore County Circuit Court. The article prompted some online discussion, and the big question was one my editor posed when I initially told her about the story: Can a person be sued for defamation based on something he or she tells a police officer?

The short answer – yes. A divided Court of Appeals ruled in 1993 that statements to police are not afforded absolute privilege, meaning they are not immune from defamation lawsuits. (The case is Caldor v. Bowden if you’re scoring at home.)

Robin Leone, a media law lawyer with Saul Ewing LLP in Baltimore, said Reinhardt’s bigger challenge will be proving he was defamed. (Full disclosure: Leone has represented The Daily Record in a First Amendment matter.) Reinhardt has to show Ensor’s statement was false and that she intended to harm him when talking to police.

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A North Carolina teenager made national news Wednesday when the ACLU filed a lawsuit on her behalf, claiming her public high school violated the girl’s constitutional rights by suspending her four times this year because she wears a piercing in her nose.

The Johnston County school system has a dress code that bans facial piercings, among numerous other fashion choices it considers to be distracting or disruptive. Reaching back into the recesses of my brain to my second semester of Con Law, I seem to recall that school dress codes will hold up under judicial scrutiny so long as they are reasonable and rationally related to a legitimate educational purpose, such as maintaining safety or discipline.

Surely Clayton High School isn’t the first in the nation to put an across-the-board content-neutral ban on body art, claiming it’s distracting to others and disrupts the pedagogical process. So why did the ACLU choose this case?

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I blogged last month about The Las Vegas Review-Journal’s “copyright enforcement partner,” who sues websites and bloggers that post the newspaper’s stories in their entirety, rather than just the links.

The Review-Journal’s strategy raised a whole bunch of legal questions. Now, it might raise some ethical questions because of one of its newest defendants: Republican U.S. Senate candidate Sharron Angle, who is challenging Democrat and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in one of the most hotly-contested and closely-watched elections of the fall.

Vegas-based blogger Steve Friess raised the ethical questions last week:

- [M]ust Nevada’s largest paper now include a passage in every news story it does on Angle’s race against Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid acknowledging that its owners have sued her?

- Can the R-J, whose publisher and editor have been outspoken supporters of the Tea Party darling, actually endorse her for Senate after having publicly accused her of stealing from them?

The Review-Journal alleges Angle posted two stories on her website without the newspaper’s permission. As of Tuesday, her website only had a paragraph from a story followed by a link, but that wasn’t always the case, as Friess has documented.

“[T]he Review-Journal has placed itself in journalistically uncharted territory,” Friess wrote Saturday. “No political or media experts I contacted could recall a mainstream newspaper ever suing a major-party candidate in the heat of a hotly contested election campaign.”

Something to watch as the general election nears.

(Speaking of elections, did you, Maryland Voter, cast your ballot in today’s primary election? You’ve got until 8 p.m.)

Longtime Cleveland Plain Dealer classical music critic Don Rosenberg last week lost his lawsuit against the paper and the Cleveland Orchestra, which he alleged forced him out of his position because of negative reviews in 2008. (Rosenberg has been re-assigned on the paper’s staff.)

Many in the classical music world have already weighed in. But I thought the best takes were those that spoke of the larger issue at play here: the role of the arts and the arts critic in society. It’s something Glenn Beck has discussed in recent weeks, taking Baltimore to task for maintaining funding levels on the Lyric despite all of its budget woes.

Martin Bernheimer, a Pulitzer Prize-winning critic, wrote in the Financial Times that Rosenberg’s case is an “alarming sign of the times”:

As government cuts of arts subsidies start to bite all over Europe, especially in Britain, there is talk of relying on “the American model.” That means an increased reliance on individual contributions – which goes along with an acceptance, presumably, of the individual powers that accompany substantial donations. Where does critical independence fit into this?

Chicago Tribune movie critic Michael Phillips wrote it’s a healthy sign when the triangular relationship between critic, newspaper and art community gets “sticky.”

There is so much fear and self-censorship in the critics’ ranks in America today. There are so few full-time salaries. You can smell the caution and paranoia in too many reviews weighed down by generalities and a stenographer’s devotion to “objectivity,” which isn’t what this endeavor is about at all. It’s about informed, vividly argued subjectivity.

Phillips also responded to Beck:

Criticism is a way of writing about life, and the world, and a symphony’s place in it, or a performer’s, or a photograph’s. …[N]o matter how frightening the economy, we must remind ourselves that we demonize the humanities… at the risk of becoming a nation we don’t want to become.

From a man at work who enjoys Men at Work, here now some news tidbits from Australia.

• The headline says it all: “Ninja students foil Aussie mugging.” Three blokes in the middle of beating a man for his iPod and cell phone fled the scene of the crime when “five black-clad ninjas” came to the rescue. The ninjitsu students were training at a nearby hall when one saw the mugging in progress. Two of the men have been arrested.
• People entering Australia must now declare at customs if they are carrying pornography. An affirmative declaration allows customs officials to search the luggage to determine if the material is legal. The move has drawn protest as an invasion of privacy by the Australian Sex Party, which notes there is no formal definition of pornography on the customs form.

Now, if you’re like me, your first thought about the second story was, “Australian Sex Party? Really?” At the risk of getting fired, I performed a quick Internet search which indicates that it does in fact exist.

G’day to everyone.

Here are some tidbits to take your mind off Maryland’s heartbreaking loss yesterday:

• Jeffrey Toobin at The New Yorker gives three immediate observations about the legal implications of the health care legislation, including how it might affect the Supreme Court.
• Above the Law has more on the potential, legal fallout of the bill.
• Speaking of SCOTUS, an Iowa lawyer provides an interesting take in today’s Baltimore Sun about its upcoming Snyder v. Phelps case.
• Encyclopaedia Britannica files a $250 million lawsuit against Dickstein Shapiro LLP for allegedly botching a patent application. (HT: Law Shucks.)
• A former Wisconsin state employee has won a discrimination lawsuit against his employer… the State’s Equal Division. (HT and “Dept. of Irony” headline to Overlawyered.)
• Today’s business tip – prevent profit “leaking” by recording all of your time while in the office.

Disturbing news out of Cleveland, and it doesn’t involve the Browns. (Ba-dum!)

A judge ordered the arrest of Cleveland Plain Dealer reporter Gabriel Baird on Tuesday after “he failed to appear at an abruptly scheduled hearing to determine how the newspaper obtained a psychiatric evaluation” of a suspected serial killer, according to the Plain Dealer.

Baird’s story based on the evaluation was published in November. The judge signed an arrest warrant for Baird’s arrest Tuesday afternoon, but “he was out on assignment,” according to the Plain Dealer. “Deputies then realized they could not serve the warrant because it did not contain Baird’s legal name.”

The judge dropped her request Wednesday when a fellow judge revealed himself as Baird’s source.

That raises a whole other host of questions, but it also gives a whole new spin on the open government advocacy goals of Sunshine Week.

Happy gorgeous Monday! Spring is in the air.

• House Judiciary chair Joe Vallario was disrespectful to Frederick Bealefeld at a hearing on automatic trials for people who don’t pay their tickets, The Sun’s Michael Dresser reports. The underlying bill, which would put the onus on people who want trials to request them, is very interesting as well.
• UM law student/blogger Moshe Glickman on the Shatzer 14-day Miranda ruling: “I under­stand that the police prac­ti­cally require a bright-line rule when they’re in the field. I respect the dif­fi­culty in for­mu­lat­ing such a rule. I seri­ously ques­tion whether this rule makes any sense whatsoever.”
• Above the Law weighs in on the Supreme Court’s cert grant in the Westboro Baptist Church case, which, of course, comes out of our own federal district. Elie Mystal writes, “So, if I’m a liberal that loves the First amendment and gays, what am I supposed to do?”
• The Charlotte Observer ran a heartwarming story over the weekend about a politician there who discovered that he was adopted and found his birth parents. His birth father, it turns out, is a politician too–a Maryland state delegate.
• Should the next SCOTUS justice be a Protestant? Does it matter? Is it OK to even discuss religion and the court?

Ohio State law professor Christopher M. Fairman offered his take Sunday about the controversy over the use of the word “retard.” Fairman said he would not be signing a petition championed by the Special Olympics to ban the use of “the r-word,” which is not surprising considering he is the author of this book.

There were two main points I took away from Fairman’s essay in The Washington Post:

1. “Words themselves are not the culprit; the meaning we attach to them is, and such meanings change dramatically over time and across communities”
2. “Invariably, negative connotations materialize around whatever new word is used. …This illustrates one of the recurring follies of speech restriction: While there may be another word to use, a negative connotation eventually is found. Offense – both given and taken – is inevitable.”

Fairman also notes courts have found government-backed “speech codes” unconstitutional.

Reaction to Fairman’s essay has been strong, including opposing views from Post columnist Michael Gerson and Timothy Shriver, president of the Special Olympics. And perhaps the most prominent opponent of the word “retard” lately has been Sarah Palin.

Washington Post readers had a chance to respond to Fairman as well during an online chat. What do you think of his position? Should “the r-word” be considered on par with “the n-word”?

I’ve come to view the social norms of the courtroom as very similar to a house of worship. You dress up nice, speak in hushed tones and try not to snore during a sermon or closing argument.

I also know you don’t whip out your cell phone in either sanctuary. If you have to call someone or need to have an in-depth conversation, you step out into the hallway as far away from everyone else as possible. It’s both considerate and common sense.

I was thinking about this as I read Andy Green’s criticism of the Baltimore City Circuit Court’s ban on Twitter in the courthouse, prompted by the Dixon trial and verdict. As The Daily Record’s Official Dixon Verdict Tweeter, I guess I’m part of the reason why the ban was enacted.

My tweets, for the record, came from the hallway outside the courtroom. Granted, most of my tweeting was done while we were awaiting a verdict, so I wasn’t leaving the courtroom during any proceeding. But when court was in session, I would try to leave quietly during a break in the action, even if that was simply someone else speaking.

Of course, the nature of the Dixon trial meant there were at least a half-dozen people “quietly” leaving the courtroom at the same time as me. Judge Dennis M. Sweeney solved the problem on at least two occasions by allowing a group of reporters to sit in the back of the courtroom and leave to Tweet and report on his cue. Once we left the courtroom, though, we were not allowed back inside until the proceeding ended.

So while you’re “working” from home today, answer me this: How would you handle Twitter if you were a judge?