Publisher's Notebook

Here’s an item for the upcoming holiday weekend. It’s the 4th of July, and you’re traveling to visit family and friends. Or maybe you’re just trying to get away.

You run a little behind, so you need to make time. You need to push the speed limit just a little. If your foot has a little too much lead in it, where are you most likely to get a speeding ticket?

Florida, according to an outfit called the National Motorists Association. The association bills itself as a “motorists’ rights group” that helps drivers fight speeding and other traffic tickets. They just completed a survey on ticketing trends.

The Sunshine State is at the top of their most-likely list, followed by Georgia and Nevada in a tie for 2nd, Texas then Alabama.

Virginia is in a tie with Minnesota for 28th place.

Wait a minute, you say. How can the NMA determine the states “most likely” to issue tickets? They used Google. They analyzed ticket-related search queries such as “speeding ticket” and “traffic ticket” over time using Google’s Search Insights — a public tool that shows state-by-state search trends across the United States.

Whether you buy that methodology or not is up to you, but note that two jurisdictions adjoining Virginia make the top 10: North Carolina rates 8th and D.C. is at number 9.

You’ll have to drive a far piece to get where tickets are least likely under the NMA survey. Montana is at the bottom, followed Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota and Alaska. If you’re driving to those places for the weekend, you better load up the kids and car right now.

A Virginia man who posted allegedly defamatory comments on Internet message boards about an Ohio-based company has to defend himself in Ohio, according to the Buckeye State’s highest court.

The plaintiff company, which makes racing equipment, is based in Glenmont, Ohio. The defendant, who lives in Richmond, argued that the Ohio long-arm statute didn’t apply. The comments were posted on two general auto-racing sites and on an eBay Motors auction site, none of which are based in Ohio. Didn’t matter, said the Ohio court. The Ohio statute applies where “defamatory statements regarding an Ohio plaintiff are made outside the state yet with the purpose of causing injury to the Ohio resident and there is a reasonable expectation that the purposefully inflicted injury will occur in Ohio.”

Two justices dissented, saying essentially, “Oh, come on!” None of the posted-on sites, a dissenter wrote, has “any specific connection to Ohio or [is] more likely to be viewed by a resident of Ohio than by a resident of any other state.”

An expert in defamation law said that this case, Kauffman Racing Equipment LLC v. Roberts, takes one of the most expansive views of jurisdiction in libel cases he has ever seen.

The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press has the story.

What are they teaching in school these days?

Up at Albemarle High School in Charlottesville, you can learn about the nine amendments to the Constitution in the Bill of Rights.

Nine amendments? Yep, at Albemarle High, they apparently don’t have much regard for that first one.

Here’s what happened last month: The student newspaper, The Revolution, published an editorial by the incoming editor.

The principal, Jay Thomas, didn’t like it. Some of the faculty didn’t like it. So the papers were destroyed. The principal’s rationale: There was a typo in the headline, and he was worried about “the impact” a controversial article would have on the author. The paper was reprinted two weeks later without the offending piece.

So what was the controversy? Did the new editor, Ellie Leech, advocate the legalization of marijuana? No. Did Leech write about teen pregnancy or, say, back the distribution of condoms? Nope again.

She wrote that student athletes who participate in school-sanctioned sports should not be required to take physical education classes. The piece, entitled, “Student’s P.E. groans might be warranted,” is available here.

Apparently the P.E. department at Albemarle High interpreted that as criticism, squawked and set in motion the destruction.

The U.S. Supreme Court, in the 1988 decision in Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier, ruled that public high schools can control, even censor, the content in student publications if the action is “reasonably related to legitimate pedagogical concerns.”

Courts have cited the Hazelwood test to stop articles in high school newspapers on the two topics cited above, drug decriminalization and teen sexual activity.

And here? Well, the principal, Thomas, cited the typo (Sean Cudahy, the outgoing editor, admitted the word “warranted” was misspelled in the original paper) and concern for the writer. But Cudahy told The Hook, Charlottesville’s alternative weekly, that those reasons were not aired at a meeting with Thomas and Kim Aust, the paper’s faculty adviser. And Leech said she wasn’t worried about the “impact” of any controversy and that she could take the heat.

Aust defended the school’s action by noting that the piece caused a “disruption to the educational process,” particularly in P.E. classes. Potentially a valid reason, but Leech’s pen is pretty powerful if it can stop gym class with a single stroke.

Adam Goldstein, a lawyer with the Student Press Law Center in Arlington, told the Charlottesville newspaper, The Daily Progress, that this is “one of the silliest censorship cases I’ve ever seen.” Cudahy and Leech would have a good lawsuit, he added.

Proof that the students at Albemarle High may have more common sense than some of their elders: Both students said they do not plan to sue. They also said nice things about Thomas and Aust, even if they disagreed with what they did. Cudahy, who graduated, will study journalism at American University. He’ll have quite a tale to tell when he gets to college.

Thomas, Aust and the P.E. department have to be glad that this all went down just before the summer break. In prepping her story menu for the fall, Leech actually can breathe just a little easier. She now has a lead for her first issue.

Aust called the episode a “good learning experience” for the student journalists. Perhaps, although you’d have to ask the students exactly what it was they learned.

All this was going on at a high school in Charlottesville. Wait a minute. Isn’t that where Thomas Jefferson came from?

Every year for the past few years, some delegate or senator has introduced a bill in the General Assembly to outlaw texting while driving. In 2010, one of the measures was House Bill 212, which, once the Assembly convened, was promptly referred to the Committee on Militia, Police and Public Safety (i.e., legislative Siberia), where the bill languished. It ultimately was “laid on the table” (a nice euphemism for “killed”) before the session ended.

The teenagers who text must have hired the same guy who lobbies for the tennis moms in SUVS and salesguys in cheap suits and cheap cars, both of whom yack on the cell phone while driving. Bills to stop same routinely go down each year as well.

A Facebook friend of mine in Utah re-posted this picture, which is now making the viral rounds. The featured church is in Alabama. Feel free to refer to it if and when you are lobbying against texting-while-driving bills next January:

Scanning the news sites this a.m. for stories for the Daily Alert…

There it was in the Charlottesville paper - a story way out of step with the current stretch of 90-degree heat and 150-percent humidity:

Federal snow aid arriving

It’s about time.

The people who passed the February 2010 Virginia bar exam are now lawyers.

The Virginia State Bar held its Admission and Orientation ceremony yesterday at the Richmond Convention Center. The seven justices of the Supreme Court of Virginia were there; the spring and fall admission ceremonies are the only times that the court meets outside its home on Ninth Street all year.

If you go to an A&O ceremony, you’ll feel a wonderful energy and a sense of satisfaction filling a very large room. The attendees made it across one finish line and are starting a new and different race. Lots of families are there too — proud spouses, proud parents, kids who don’t quite know what’s going on, only that Mom or Dad is really, really happy.

I’ve been serving as the sponsor for the Washington & Lee law school graduates at the spring ceremony for about seven or eight years now. To appear before the high court while welcoming fellow W&L grads to the bar is one of my favorite tasks. I never fail to flash back to a fall day in 1985 at the grand ballroom at the old John Marshall Hotel. Ponder a minute, and I’m sure your own swearing-in day will float back from memory, whether it was in the Supreme Court Building, the John Marshall, the Richmond Marriott or the Convention Center. A pretty good day, wasn’t it?

To the crowd yesterday: Well done, and cheers!

Forty-eight states have joined an amicus brief in the appeal of a $5 million verdict in favor of a man who sued protesters who showed up at his son’s funeral.

Virginia is one of the two states (Maine is the other) that declined to back Albert Snyder’s appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. Snyder won his lawsuit against Fred Phelps and his Kansas-based fundamentalist church, Westboro Baptist.

Phelps and his supporters showed up the funeral of Marine Lance Cpl. Matthew Snyder, carrying signs with messages such as “Thank God for dead soldiers.” The group has picketed military funerals across America because they believe deaths during wartime are punishment for the country’s tolerance of homosexuality.

The Associated Press has the full story.

Snyder won in federal court in Baltimore; the verdict was reversed in the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which cited free speech concerns. Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli likewise said that the commonwealth wouldn’t back the appeal, noting through a spokesman that “the case could set a precedent that could severely curtail certain valid exercises of free speech.”

The case may provide a significant ruling on the 1st Amendment and what limits can be place on our fundamental right of free speech.

What do you think? Is Cuccinelli right? Or do the officials in the 48 other states, who believe there is a compelling state interest in keeping protesters away from funerals?