Maybe it's because I'm a long-ago high school newspaper editor, but I was shocked and appalled (nobody is ever shocked but not appalled) by a New York Times report that Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy -- "widely regarded as one of the court’s most vigilant defenders of First Amendment values" -- insisted on reviewing and tweaking an article about his appearance at a private school in New York. The student newspaper at the Dalton School published a tantalizing editor's note saying: "We are not able to cover the recent visit by a Supreme Court justice due to numerous publication constraints."

Then I read the Times article again and discerned some shades of ethical gray. It's true, as Frank D. LoMonte of the Student Press Law Center said, that "in the professional world, it would be a nonstarter if a source demanded prior approval of coverage of a speech." But apparently Kennedy's purpose wasn't to vet the article as a whole but to reconsider the felicity of some of his phraseology.

It wasn't clear whether he made this request in advance. But if he did, and the agreement was confined to allowing him to polish his prose, I'm less shocked but still somewhat appalled. My own practice as a reporter was to refuse at the outset to show my completed story to an interviewee. As for quotes, I never would allow someone to retract or rephrase an answer because of second thoughts about its political effect.

But I made an exception when I did a series of interviews with prominent intellectuals. One law professor, in explaining his constitutional philosophy, used an analogy in reference to the Constitution. He later called me to suggest a different analogy that he said more precisely made his point. I let him change it, because the whole purpose of the piece was to let him present his thinking in his own words.

The difference here is that the Kennedy story was an account of an event at which an audience heard the justice's original words. That tips the scales of journalistic justice. Kennedy said what he said; if he wanted to correct it, he should have written a letter to the editor.

Actually, there's a precedent. Last year the court ruled that the death penalty couldn't be imposed for rape. Writing for the court, Kennedy cited as proof that the penalty was cruel and unusual the fact that, while 26 states and the federal government, had the death penalty, "only six of those jurisdictions authorize the death penalty for the rape of a child." After the decision, a blogger pointed out that the Uniform Code of Military Justice allowed the death sentence in the rape of a child, a fact the court had overlooked

The court added a footnote rectifying its omission -- but it didn't blot out the original language.

--Michael McGough

Federal law gives copyright owners a legal monopoly over public performance of their works, among other uses. But their market power is supposed to be limited by the competition from other copyright owners. Consider the case of songwriters. Paul McCartney can make you pay for the privilege of including "Jet" in your movie, even if it's recorded by Shonen Knife instead of McCartney's Wings. But if you don't like what he charges, you can write your own material or go to another songwriter who demands less.

Unless you can't go to someone else. That's the problem TV broadcasters face when they air syndicated programming. They're contractually bound to air the programs they buy with the music that's already in the soundtrack. As a result, they have zero leverage with songwriters when it comes to negotiating for the rights to broadcast those songs. A group of broadcasters has now gone to federal court in New York for help, filing a class-action antitrust lawsuit against SESAC, one of the three performing rights organizations representing songwriters and music publishers. (You can download a copy here.)

The complaint was filed Wednesday afternoon by lawyers from Weil, Gotshal & Manges, and SESAC hasn't offered any comment yet. It singles out SESAC, the smallest of the performing rights groups (the others are ASCAP and BMI), for two reasons: SESAC's stable of composers includes many of the leading music writers for TV and commercials, and the other two rights groups' rates are already overseen by federal courts through longstanding consent decrees with the Justice Department.

Not being a lawyer, I won't try to guess how strong the broadcasters' case is. What's interesting to me about this case is that, unlike many of the lawsuits I write about, it doesn't challenge the breadth of the copyright owners' rights. Instead, it challenges how they're being used. According to the lawsuit, SESAC gives broadcasters the choice between buying a blanket license — the right to make unlimited use of all the music in SESAC's repertoire — or buying rights for songs on a per-program basis. But SESAC increased the cost of the per-program deal so much in recent years, it has become uneconomic, the lawsuit contends. As a result, broadcasters have been stuck buying ever-more-expensive blanket licenses, rendering moot their efforts to shop around for programs with less costly sources of music. In other words, SESAC is accused of eliminating the competition that mitigates the copyright holders' monopoly power. Meanwhile, the lawsuit claims, SESAC has used the higher fees it's been collecting to attract more soundtrack and commercial composers, tightening its grip on the market.

The broadcasters asked the court for a permanent injunction barring SESAC from fixing prices and other anticompetitive behavior. If they succeed, SESAC could find itself in the same court-supervised posture as ASCAP and BMI. But another way to restore the full benefits of competition among songwriters would be to have the producers of TV shows and commercials obtain the performance rights to the music they use, on top of the sync licenses and other clearances they routinely negotiate for. (Most networks obtain the performance rights for the new shows they produce for their stations and affiliates, but not for the same shows when they're sold into syndication.) As it is, the competition among songwriters ends as soon as a soundtrack is picked. That's why SESAC is allegedly in position to make take-it-or-leave-it offers to broadcasters, who have little choice but to take it.

-- Jon Healey

Chances are that Tangipahoa Parish's 8th Ward in Louisiana will get along just fine without the services of Keith Bardwell, a justice of the peace who refused to perform a wedding for an interracial couple. The marriages don't last, Bardwell claimed, and the children are worse off. Bardwell's the one who didn't last on this round; he resigned, the state announced today.

In an interview reported by CNN, Bardwell said, "I needed to step down because they was going to take me to court, and I was going to lose."

Actually, the reason he needed to step down is that he's approximately half a century behind the rest of the nation when it comes to civil rights.

The couple were married elsewhere and are now suing Bardwell and his wife, Beth -- who they claim asked them if they were a "mixed couple" and told them they'd have to go to another parish to wed.

Keith Bardwell sees it all as a matter of conscience, and that might be the one point on which he and I agree. "I found out I can't be a justice of the peace and have a conscience," he complained. Conscience does play the key role in this sad, stupid affair: If the man can't obey the law, he should have been honorable enough not to take the job in the first place.

--Karin Klein

Not for use with small animals. (EPA/Peter Foley)

Alito's hypo seems a bit less far-fetched when one considers the popularity of WWE, televised hockey games and even The History Channel (which one of my peacenik relatives calls The War Channel). Violence sells, But censors, with support from the courts, usually have  focused on sex instead. What puts obscenity outside the protection of the First Amendment is that it appeals to "prurient interest" -- that is, it's sexually arousing.

Patricia Millett, the lawyer for video vendor Stevens, ratified the "violence OK, sex bad" rationale. She conceded that the law might have survived a First Amendment challenge if it  had been narrowly drawn to punish only the phenomenon that provoked the legislation -- so-called "crush videos" catering to fetishists who are turned on by seeing a woman crush dogs with her high heels. A non-erotic, aesthetic appreciation of dog-fighting, however, is protected.

The sex/violence dichotomy has inspired the familiar joke about the differences between conservatives and liberals when it comes to censorship: Conservatives want to ban depictions of sex, liberals want to ban descriptions of violence. But it's rooted in the traditional justification for laws against obscenity: society's interest in preventing debauchery. As a 19th century British judge put it: "I think the test of obscenity is this, whether the tendency of the matter charged as obscenity is to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences and into whose hands a publication of this sort may fall." In other words, keep reading this and you'll go blind.

That rationale arguably applies to "crush videos," but it's hard to see how it justifies prosecution of the sale of dogfighting videos, which means that Stevens likely will go free. Watching violence against animals is constitutionally protected as long as you don't enjoy it too much. If a Cable TV producer greenlights Alito's idea of a Human Sacrifice Channel, he should be careful to market it to anthropologists, not sadists.

-- Michael McGough

Reports are in that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger isn't going to close 100 state parks or anything like that number. Closing parks isn't the big moneysaver the governor had expected; the Times editorial page warned him about that in early June.

There also were small towns whose financial lives depend depend on the tourism brought by state monuments or parks.

The Times will editorialize tomorrow on the reasons why the governor should have thought this out better before donning his parks-Terminator costume.

Photo of Pio Pico State Historic Park in Whittier. Credit: David McNew / Getty Images

--Karin Klein

Even if I hadn't covered the U.S. Supreme Court in a former life, I'd be looking forward eagerly to C-SPAN's interviews next month with members of the court, snippets of which are available now on YouTube. It's not often that TV viewers get to eye the mugs of The Nine.

But it's not never, either. Not counting their confirmation hearings, justices have been selectively subjecting themselves to TV interviews for some time, sometimes in connection with promoting their books. This fact renders even more ridiculous one argument against cameras in the courtroom, Justice Clarence Thomas' suggestion that, after 9/11, televising the court's aguments would let terrorists know what the justices look like. All they have to do is TiVo C-SPAN.

The more familiar argument against cameras in the Supreme Court is that they might alter the ethos of the court, perhaps by tempting justices into "saying something for a soundbite." (The quote comes from Justice Anthony Kennedy, pictured above.) Believe me, the Supreme Court arguments I've heard are eminently unsoundbitable.

Like the law that it interprets, the court should be open to evolutionary change. Television has been around for 60 years. The justices may still be camera-shy, but, as Justice Antonin Scalia once said in a somewhat different context: Get over it!"

Photo credit: AP Photo / J. Scott Applewhite

-- Michael McGough

 In today's Los Angeles Times editorial pages, author Ethan Rarick finally gives Nevada the business, so to speak. In case you've missed the flap, Nevada is the latest in a long line of states to spend money making a play for California businesses, which claim to be mistreated and which others claim are deserting the state in droves. Not happening, Rarick says, picking up on stats that the Public Policy Institute of California put out a couple of years ago. 

The Times editorial board remembers Sen. Edward M. Kennedy. Here's someone whose life actually measures up to the tributes.

The ed board also checks in on Tuesday's school board vote to, in essence, get the board out of the business of running more than 100 Los Angeles schools.

And columnist Meghan Daum nails the entire generation: we're still trying to figure out how to be grownups. The dead giveaways are the similarities, and differences, between "thirtysomething" and "Mad Men."

Photo: AP Photo / Charles Krupa

--Robert Greene

In what seems to be part of a crackdown on civil rights lawyers in China, the Chinese government has arrested prominent civil rights lawyer Xu Zhiyong on tax fraud charges. Zhiyong, who has not been heard from since his arrest two weeks ago, started the nonprofit Open Constitution Initiative legal clinic six years ago, which has recently represented victims of the poisoned milk powder that left three children dead and 6,000 sick in China. Zhiyong's clinic was shut down for "tax evasion." Experts say this arrest does not bode well for the already precarious rule of law in China, and human rights activists across the political spectrum are calling for President Obama to speak up on the issue.

In today's editorial pages, The Times wishes Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, and the rest of California, the best of luck in tackling the looming public pension crisis.

The ed board also tries to wrap its collective head around the notion that so many Americans think the current health care system is just fine as it is now -- and so many Americans have been showing up to take advantage of a program to get around the current health care system. Check out the editorial on the Remote Area Medical Foundation:

Also, we applaud Hillary Clinton for her focus in Africa on rape as a war crime.

On the Op-Ed side, in the wake of the recently announced deal between the IRS and the Swiss bank UBS, law professor and Holocaust lawyer Burt Neuborne takes on Swiss banks, their secrecy, and their penchant for protecting tax cheats and worse.

And Tom Hayden thinks someone somewhere ought to check to see whether there was a plot by independent police monitor Michael Cherkasky to get a federal judge to lift the LAPD consent decree for the express purpose of allowing Cherkasky to hire LAPD Chief William J. Bratton at Cherkasky's new security company.

And one more: Gen X-er columnist Meghan Daum salutes her era's Boswell, the late John Hughes.

Photo: Max Whittaker / Getty Images

President Obama threw a party at the White House this morning for new Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor. He shouldn't have invited her, and she shouldn't have come. Her appearance exacerbated the politicization of the court that led so many Republican senators to vote against her.

In celebrating what he called an "extraordinary moment for our nation," Obama didn't pressure Sotomayor to vote in a particular way. Still, it was unseemly for the president to treat Sotomayor's confirmation as a political trophy. The victory party undermined the symbolism of Sotomayor's swearing-in at the court rather than at the White House.

Until her confirmation, Sotomayor was in a sense a creature of the executive branch headed by Obama. Once she was confirmed and sworn in, she was (and is) an officer of an independent branch of government that is often called upon to overturn the actions of the other two branches.  

One of my favorite scenes in "Becket," the biopic about the 12th century saint, is when Richard Burton as Becket realizes that he can't serve simultaneously as archbishop of Canterbury and chancellor of England.  Never mind that he owes his appointment as archbishop to King Henry II (played by Peter O'Toole). I wouldn't push the church-state analogy too far, but Sotomayor also may be called upon to reprimand her patron. With that in mind, she should have spent this morning poring over briefs.

Photo credit: Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images

-- Michael McGough