Bill Girdner

The one pursues it, the other decries it — technology, money, success, power, pleasure.

In a town where the most destructive of all weapons was made, a big portion of the townspeople own guns while their kids play softball, go fishing at the gun club, and attend public school.

Kansas Chief Justice Marla Luckert has moved quickly and decisively to bring back prompt access to new court pleadings, a longtime tradition in the courts of America.

The canard that free trade is good for everybody has at last come home to roost. But, in a Jack in the Box epiphany, it most likely no longer matters.

Rulings and judgments in state courts are falling into a black hole. A simple filter would open that work product to public view.

Interrupted at work by a phone call putting me into a town hall, I waited for my congresswoman to come up with an attack line that finds its mark.

The panel upheld a finding by U.S. District Judge Christina Reiss that

Virginia has set up a two-tier system of access to court records, one for officials and lawyers that is remote, and another for plebes that is not.

Underneath the daily sturm und drang in the brief life of the new administration, tectonic plates in an old alliance are shifting. And as the old world reveals its democratic core, the new world is losing it.

“Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might, for there is no work or device or knowledge or wisdom in the grave where you are going.” That’s good stuff, strong and dark, from Ecclesiastes.

Obeying an under-the-radar executive order, the Army Corps of Engineers has expedited every permit asking for destruction of wetlands throughout the United States, including a strip that runs unbroken down the nation’s West Coast from Seattle to Santa Barbara.

So long central to the notion of western civilization, the strands in the rope that binds America and Europe are snapping one by one.

The full weight of U.S. news organizations attacked the constitutionality of Virginia’s policy that gives remote access to some but sends the press and public down the road to individual courthouses in an area that covers 30,000 square miles.

When it comes to public access to court records, Hawaii is the heaven of it and Virginia the hell of it.

Courthouse News asks the Fourth Circuit for en banc review of a Virginia policy that allows lawyers and officials to see court records remotely but bars journalists and the public from that same access.

Defying two decades of experience, state courts have recently been willing to grant public access to new court records as they are received. Holdouts remain.

Free trade agreements and a porous border doomed the American worker and their old party.

Google has landed in the great smithy that is the American system of justice.

Downshifting into the rhythm and relative peace of the American idyll, we watched a true phenom play the game just before the end of baseball’s regular season last weekend.

A federal judge enjoined a state administrator who was in effect sealing all new court pleadings until the news bled out of them.