Prior restraint

The California Court of Appeal yesterday ordered a lower court to vacate an unprecedented order that prevented The Orange County Register from reporting on testimony in a lawsuit involving its parent company, Freedom Communications, Inc.

A Cincinnati-based alternative weekly sued local prosecutors, police and clergymen in federal district court Tuesday, saying their efforts to banish adult advertisements have violated the paper's First Amendment rights.

The complaint alleges a "conspiracy" to violate CityBeat's First Amendment rights, seen in the public officials' partnership with religious groups in protesting the ads.

Tennessee investigative reporter Phil Williams, who is scheduled to testify against a former senator, and his news station are challenging a federal judge’s gag order preventing Williams from covering the story.

Williams and NewsChannel 5 argued in their petition last Thursday that the gag order is an unconstitutional prior restraint of free speech and free press, in violation of the First Amendment.

Less than a week after U.S. District Judge Jeffrey S. White lifted an injunction against the whistleblower Web site Wikileaks, the Swiss bank dropped its lawsuit.

Julius Baer and Co. said it reserved the right to pursue its case at a later date in the same court or elsewhere.

Last week a federal judge ordered a Web site that posts leaked material to disable itself entirely before coming back to say it only needed to stop posting certain documents related to a case brought by a Cayman Islands bank.

The Nevada Supreme Court ruled that MSNBC was not required to include long-shot presidential hopeful Dennis Kucinich in its Tuesday night debate.  The court held that to force the broadcaster to cancel its debate if it would not allow Kucinich to participate would be an unconstitutional prior restraint on NBC's First Amendment rights.

A rare prior restraint on speech has turned up in an unlikely place -- a divorce case -- with a Vermont judge ordering a husband to take down blog postings about his wife and their dissolving marriage. The husband called his postings a "fictionalized account of the marriage" according to a New York Times article, but the wife contended they are defamatory statements and the judge ordered the posts be removed pending a February hearing.

After holding a reporter in contempt of court for airing an interview with a potential juror in the high-profile trial of polygamist sect leader and convicted rapist Warren Jeffs, Judge James L. Shumate found that reporter Katie Baker's unrelated Nov. 20 report on a homeless program satisfied his mandate that she produce a human-interest news report to clear the charges.

A high school student's diary containing comments promoting violence against homosexual and minority students and laying out plans for Columbine-like shootings at several schools was enough to lead the school's principal to call the student a "terroristic threat" and resulted in his arrest. Though no criminal charges were filed against the student, in his civil case against the school, the U.S.