A New Challenge to Warrantless GPS Tracking:  At Blog of the Legal Times, Mike Scarcella posts on an amicus brief filed in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit today in U.S. v. Maynard and Jones.  The amicus brief argues that authorities violated search and seizure law when, without a warrant, they installed a GPS device on a drug suspect's vehicle and tracked the vehicle for a month.  According to the court records, a D.C. federal court judge had authorized investigators to install a GPS device on Jones' Jeep but investigators attached the device in Maryland (outside the scope of the warrant) and did not install the device until after the warrant had expired.  At the trial level, the district court judge denied a motion to suppress evidence, saying that the GPS did not violate Fourth Amendment search and seizure restrictions because investigators could have watched the driver and the vehicle as it went around town.  Today's amicus brief argues the decision was incorrect because GPS tracking reveals "a plethora of intimate information about a person's life, including his or her travel to political meetings, places of worship, news media offices, or the homes of friends or lovers."  [In this blogger's humble opinion, a warrant might be needed to attach the GPS, but actual travel to public meetings isn't exactly the sort of thing where one can claim a reasonable expectation of privacy.]

Today at the U.S. Supreme Court:  In a post titled "Supreme Court Debates Judicial Ethics and Rules on Standing, Refugees," Tony Mauro blogs on today's action at the U.S. Supreme Court.  Mauro first writes about today's oral argument in Caperton v. Massey, a judicial ethics case that will address whether an elected judge's failure to recuse himself from a case in which he received substantial campaign donations from one of the parties violates due process.  According to Mauro, in today's argument the attorney for Massey Coal Co. spent much of his time defending his argument that recusal should not be a constitutional due process issue.  Mauro also writes that at one point Justice Scalia wondered aloud whether a recusal standard for elected judges might also affect appointed judges like himself.  Mauro also briefly summarizes the the two opinions that were handed down today in Summers v. Earth Island Institute and Negusie v. United States.  Kent also posted on implications of Summers for capital habeas litigation here.

Commenting on the Web:  Two posts put up today, one by Eugene Volokh at Volokh Conspiracy, and one by David L. Hudson Jr. at First Amendment Center discuss potential legal repercussions of blogging or commenting on the World Wide Web.  Volokh's post discusses a Louisiana Capital Post-Conviction Project attorney's threats to silence the blog comments of Patrick Frey, a Los Angeles County Deputy District Attorney, and the author of the blog "Patterico's Pontifications."  Apparently, Frey wrote a long and detailed post analyzing allegations that 2 prosecution experts in a Louisiana murder case manufactured evidence that helped send the Louisina attorney's client, Jimmie Duncan, to death row.  Duncan's attorney then threatened to file an ethics complaint against Frey if he did not stop commenting on her case.  Volokh wonders if Frey's speech is protected by the First Amendment.  At First Amendment Center, David L. Hudson Jr. writes about Maryland's decision in Independent Newspapers Inc. v. Brodie and how it affects plaintiffs' ability to file libel suits to unmask anonymous online critics. The decision now requires a plaintiff to establish a prima facie case of defamation before a court must unmask the anonymous commentor.