Publisher's Notebook

The justices of the United States Supreme Court apparently don’t know much about how today’s modern technology works.

Lawyers USA had the skinny this past week, in a blog post that has gone viral. Check it out here.

Kimberly Atkins, our colleague in the District, writes “DC Dicta,” a blog dedicated to following the Supreme Court, Congress, just about anything in Washington that affects the legal profession. She routinely attends proceedings at the high court.

On Monday, she reported on arguments in City of Ontario v. Quon, a case about whether police officers have an expectation of privacy in personal text messages (some of them sexually explicit) sent on pagers issued by the city.

The court’s tech deficit became apparent about halfway through arguments. The first clue: Chief Justice John G. Roberts asked, what is the difference “between e-mail and a pager?”

Other justices were similarly flummoxed, asking, among other things, if you could get a text message while sending one and if cops could print out the text messages.

Or as Justice Antonin Scalia put it, “Could [the officer] print these spicy little conversations and send them to his buddies?”

In fairness to the court, Kim also reported that one of the lawyers did no better. He got wrapped around the axle when asked whether the texts could be deleted permanently or not by the wireless carrier, ultimately conceding he didn’t know the answer.

One hopes they all – justices and lawyers combined – get it figured out before an opinion is handed down.

The Virginia Lawyers Weekly editorial team brought home two company-wide editorial awards from the Dolan Media Editorial and Circulation Summit held last week in Scottsdale, Arizona.

Dolan Media Company conducts the Samuel B. Spencer Journalism Awards each year, gathering nominations from its 18 business units publishing 60-some print titles and numerous websites.

The Virginia team won third place in headline writing for a March 2009 story, “Oval and Out: OBX can’t be trademarked.” The piece was a case story about a man’s failed effort to trademark the popular “OBX” tag that appears in oval stickers on cars everywhere on the East Coast. In the words of the headline, he was “oval and out.”

And we brought home the bronze in the creativity category for “The VLW Quick 10,” our popular online feature that debuted last June. “Quick 10″ lists compiled by our editors have included judges’ nicknames, made-up “new lawyer law firms,” Virginia cases about food, lawyer license plates, reasons to strike jurors that stood up and Christmas carols for lawyers, among others. The full name of the award is the “Justice Potter Stewart Freestyle Creativity Award,” named for the late Supreme Court justice who knew pornography “when he saw it.” The Dolan Media judges took the same approach to creativity.

Our colleagues at St. Louis-based Missouri Lawyers Media, publishers of seven titles including Missouri Lawyers Weekly, took home the competition’s top prize as “Best in Show.”