Mississippi Litigation Review & Commentary : Mississippi Personal Injury Lawyer & Attorney : Phillip W. Thomas Law Firm : MS Litigation Review & Commentary

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Alan Lange announced on Monday that he will no longer be the primary face of Yall Politics:

All good things must come to an end. My tenure as the primary face of YallPolitics is one of those things. I am happy to announce that Frank Corder of the FireMcCoy blog will now be the face of YallPolitics.

There are a lot of reasons why I am making this change, but ultimately the biggest one is I just think it’s time.

The accomplishments of the site are staggering:

Over 40,000,000 page views
Almost 30,000 posts that now serve as a living breathing Mississippi political archive
Regularly named as one of the best state political blogs in the state/country
Mentions by the WSJ, LA Times, Forbes, WAPO, Overlawyered, Michelle Malkin, Glenn Reynolds, Pajamas, Politico, RedState, the Hill (I’m sure I’m forgetting a few) and just about every Mississippi political columnist and pundit around
And, of course, the book Kings of Tort that I co-authored as a result of our coverage of the Dickie Scruggs scandal.

Lange was an active blogger for 7 years.

My Take:

He ran a blog for 7 years? Many blogs go dormant before they have 7 posts. Blogging for 7 years is about like playing running back in the NFL for 20 years. I don't know how long I'll be able to hang in there on this blog. But I bet it's not 7 years.  

Blogging is like shrimping. Hard. And sometimes you wonder why the hell you do it. Particularly when you piss people off. And if you have a decent political or legal blog, you are going to piss some people off.  

Alan Lange is one of the founding fathers of Mississippi blogging. He built Yall Politics into a one-stop site for political information in Mississippi, including legal issues with mass public or political interest. In addition to reporting and commenting, Lange led a legal challenge a to secrecy orders in a court proceeding. In writing about that case I stated:

It’s an interesting indicator of the direction of the media that the challenge was made by a blog instead of a print newspaper. In the past, newspapers would have made this type of challenge. But with circulations down and news papers both struggling financially and controlled by large corporations, the days of newspapers being the conscience of the community appear over. That role appears to be shifting to bloggers. But in Mississippi at least, there are probably not enough bloggers yet to completely fill the void.

Lange and Yall Politics are a big reason why there are any bloggers to fill the void. We have some very good reporters in Mississippi. But we do not have enough of them. Blogs like Ya'll Politics, Jackson Jambalaya and NMissCommentor play a huge role in keeping people informed. And they do it for free.  

I doubt that this blog would exist if Yall Politics never existed. That probably applies to other current and future blogs that Mississippians rely on for information. It's hard to overstate the impact that the site has had under Lange's leadership. Lange will be in the inaugural class of the Mississippi Blogging Hall of Fame.    

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In 2007 State Farm sued Attorney General Jim Hood. Here is the Complaint. State Farm does not like Jim Hood. No one likes State Farm. When State Farm filed the lawsuit, it filed this motion to seal the case. The Court later unsealed the case.

In 2008 Sate Farm and Hood settled and the Court dismissed the case. Here is the order. The terms of the settlement agreement were confidential and the court ordered that they remain under seal.

In 2009 Ya'll Politics, joined by three television stations, moved to intervene in the case in order to obtain the terms of the settlement agreement. State Farm did not object. General Hood did. Here is Hood's Response to the Motion to Unseal the agreement.

Hood's response states several times that the Court ordered that the settlement agreement be sealed upon a showing of good cause. I have looked for something in the record confirming that statement, but have not found it. Maybe I just missed it.

It seems that Hood views the terms of the settlement agreement as politically embarrassing. But open access to court proceedings should take precedent over politics.  

It is bad form and bad law for court files to be sealed without an evidentiary basis for a finding of good cause in the record. An example is Judge Yerger's unexplained sealing of all relevant pleadings in the Eaton v. Frisby case pending in Hinds County.  In the good old days newspapers viewed themselves as the guardians of public access to the courts and challenged improper sealing of court files and court proceedings. Now, newspapers can't afford to pay the lawyers to make the challenges.

I would like to see Judge Bramlette grant the motion for two reasons. First, it would reverse the trend of unexplained sealing of court files and confidentiality orders not supported with evidence. Second, it would start a trend of new media (a blog) successfully challenging secrecy in the courts. 

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Last week Judge Bramlette issued an Opinion and Order allowing Jackson New Media, Inc. (Alan Lange’s Ya’ll Politics), WDAM, WLBT and WLOX to challenge the settlement agreement in the State Farm v. Hood case. Attorney General Jim Hood opposes the request to unseal the agreement. The challengers will now file a motion to lift the seal and Judge Bramlette will rule on that motion.

It’s an interesting indicator of the direction of the media that the challenge was made by a blog instead of a print newspaper. In the past, newspapers would have made this type of challenge. But with circulations down and news papers both struggling financially and controlled by large corporations, the days of newspapers being the conscience of the community appear over. That role appears to be shifting to bloggers. But in Mississippi at least, there are probably not enough bloggers yet to completely fill the void.

Hopefully, the success in this case will lead to media outlets challenging Judge Yerger’s confidentiality order in the Eaton v. Frisby case. The case is probably the single biggest case in the Mississippi state court system and involved one of the parties (Eaton) secretly hiring Ed Peters when Bobby DeLaughter was the judge on the case. Judge Yerger’s decision to seal virtually the entire proceeding appears unjustified and, more importantly, is not explained in the public court record. 

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Earlier this week Alan Lange at Ya'll Politics reported that Christi McCoy is no longer in the running for the appointment for U.S. Attorney for the Northern District. As mentioned in this earlier post, Patsy Brumfield at the N.E. Daily Journal disagreed. I did not opine on the issue in my earlier post, but I am now going on the record saying that Lange is right and that McCoy will not be appointed. I have two sources who both told me that McCoy's nomination hit an insurmountable snag. My sources are less certain that Curtis Ivy will be appointed for the slot, but he does appear to be in the running.