I was searching around waiting for someone to take notice of this heinous situation when I saw this story. And this story as well. I am more spiritual than religious, but all I can say right now is God bless them, for Derrick's sake, for the sake of the First Amendment and for the sake of Justice.Mystery Blogger Caught Up in First Amendment Flap
Posted December 3rd, 2008 by Sam Bayard
"....I can't imagine anything that would justify such a sweeping prior restraint on his speech....It looks like the court failed to brush up on some basics of defamation and First Amendment law before issuing its order."
Denner v. Boston Bob
Posted December 3rd, 2008 by Sam Bayard
Boston Bob created the blog in mid-October 2008, after apparently meeting Derrick Gillenwater and discussing Gillenwater's malpractice lawsuit against Jeffrey Denner and Kevin Barron, two Boston lawyers. Gillenwater himself is a blogger, and at the time he also operated a blog dedicated to criticizing Jeffrey Denner and discussing the lawsuit at http://jeffreydenner.blogspot.com.
At around the same time that Boston Bob started his blog, Denner and Barron obtained a restraining order and then a preliminary injunction from a Massachusetts state court prohibiting Gillenwater from blogging about Denner and from filing motions or pleadings without prior permission of the court. For details, see our database entry, Denner v. Gillenwater.
Boston Bob published only three posts before Blogger temporarily removed the blog, all of which related to Gillenwater's lawsuit and alleged malpractice on the part of Denner and Barron. Since the takedown, Boston Bob has published a series of posts criticizing the court's gag order as unconstitutional.
2 comments:
Founders and Directors
David Ardia (Director and Co-Founder): David is a Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society. He received his J.D. degree, summa cum laude, from Syracuse University College of Law and an LL.M. from Harvard Law School. Prior to coming to the Berkman Center, he was assistant counsel at The Washington Post and before that was an associate at Williams & Connolly in Washington, DC, where he handled a range of intellectual property and media litigation. While at Williams & Connolly, David also performed pre-publication libel review for the National Enquirer and In Touch Weekly. David is a former member of the Newspaper Association of America’s Legal Affairs Committee and is a current member of the First Amendment and Media Litigation Committee of the American Bar Association, the Media Law Committee of the District of Columbia Bar, and the New England Media Lawyers Group.
Sam Bayard (Assistant Director): Sam is a Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society. He received his J.D. degree, summa cum laude, from Cornell Law School in 2001, where he was Managing Editor of the Cornell Law Review. In December 2006, he completed an LL.M. in International and Comparative Law at the American University in Cairo, where he also intensively studied the Arabic language and got to witness the veritable explosion of Egyptian blogging activity. Before moving to Cairo, Sam was a litigation associate at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz in New York. Sam also clerked for the Honorable Lewis Kaplan in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. As a clerk, Sam worked on numerous cases involving intellectual property and emerging technology issues and assisted Judge Kaplan in preparing his remarks for the 2001 Brace Lecture for the Copyright Society of the U.S.A. which addressed the Judge’s controversial opinion in Universal City Studios, Inc. v. Reimerdes.
Note that the Court Order neatly declines to address the First Amendment.
-Boston Bob.
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