From Journalists, A Look at Celebrity Law Cases

For lawyers-turned-journalists, it’s sometimes a struggle to bring meaning to a national obsession with sensationalist legal cases such as the Scott Peterson murder case and the Michael Vick dog-fighting scandal.

Last night, Harvard Law School graduates James B. Stewart Jr., Jeffrey R. Toobin ’82, and Lis W. Wiehl gave a no-holds barred assessment of life as a legal journalist in a panel discussion called “Covering the Story: Lawyers in the World of Journalism.”

The three returned to campus as part of a new “Law and the Arts Initiative” at the Law School. Moderated by law professor Noah R. Feldman ’92, the event drew a crowd of about 70 law students, faculty, and alumni.

The three panelists revealed a celebrity-crazed underbelly to their work. They identified race, sex, and celebrity as pivotal factors in making “the crimes of the century” that they cover—from the Anna Nicole Smith affair to the Duke rape scandal.

“There is an appetite for this stuff,” said Toobin, who graduated from the Law School in 1986 and is a CNN legal correspondent and New Yorker staff writer.

“I couldn’t do my work for CNN if I was a complete snob about this. The challenge is to invest these cases with some of your knowledge,” he said.

A former Crimson sports writer and editorialist, Toobin credits the O.J. Simpson trial in 1994 with launching his career as a legal analyst for TV.

The panelists peppered the discussion with anecdotes about sitting next to La Toya Jackson at the Michael Jackson trial and experiencing the circus of mass media that descended on Eagle, Colo. during the Kobe Bryant scandal.

But the panelists acknowledged that their jobs can get tricky when analyzing Supreme Court decisions and white-collar crimes for a television audience.

“In law school, the longer the better, the more complicated, the more footnotes,” said Wiehl, a 1987 Law School graduate who authored the book “The 51% Minority: How Women Still Are Not Equal and What You Can Do About It.”

“On television, you have to bear down and try to translate these complicated decisions without condescending or pandering,” said Wiehl, who is a legal analyst at Fox News.

In an interview with The Crimson after the event, two of the panelists revealed a less glamorous side to the profession.

Stewart, Pulitzer Prize-winning author and SmartMoney editor-at-large, recounted spending Valentine’s Day alone in Arkansas while tracking down a story.

“It was late, and I was in downtown Little Rock, and the only place I could find to eat was a hotel with a Valentine Day’s special menu and roses on every table,” said Stewart, who graduated from the Law School in 1976 and is a former front-page editor of The Wall Street Journal.

Wiehl remembered broadcasting on location during a downpour.

“There was electrical stuff everywhere,” she said.

“The cameraman and I looked at each other—we were terrified we would be electrocuted.”