ABA President Robert J. Grey, Jr., has issued a statement in defense of the judges who have suffered personal attacks from commentators during the Terri Schiavo matter. (He's also condemned violence against judges and court personnel.) I've read a lot of criticism of Judge Greer and the federal judges who've issued recent rulings, but I haven't read any criticism that seems meritorious to me.
The ABA has also formed a Presidential Task Force on the Attorney-Client Privilege. The task force's mission statement mentions the efforts of the SEC and DOJ to force corporations to waive the privilege -- a topic I've covered here before -- but that's not the only erosion of the privilege we've seen recently. We've added numerous exceptions to the duty of confidentiality, the DOJ has been very aggressive in impinging on privilege during the war on terror, and federal agencies have floated proposals to further diminish the privilege. I'm not going to say that the sky is falling but, as I've argued elsewhere, these erosions have the hallmarks of a tragedy of the commons. We are nibbling away at the privilege and are reducing the public goods that the privilege produces. Each erosion, by itself, has little negative effect -- or so we are told by each federal agency that proposes to further erode the privilege. But who is looking at the larger picture? I hope the ABA task force is.