Little Rock lawyer's legal blog put on list of 100 best

Hall’s 4th Amendment musings noted

FourthAmendment.com, the blog of Little Rock attorney John Wesley Hall, has been named one of the 100 best digital media for a legal audience by the magazine of the American Bar Association.

A nationally regarded defense attorney, Hall has been publishing a blog devoted to recording case law involving the part of the U.S. Constitution's Bill of Rights that regulates governmental searches and seizures.

With more than 20,000 posts by Hall since its 2003 inception, the blog is a compendium of legal rulings on Fourth Amendment issues, interspersed with a smattering of news accounts, updated daily or as close to daily as Hall can make it.

The ABA Journal, the monthly publication of the 400,000-member legal organization, annually recognizes outstanding legal blogs, podcasts and social media postings. FourthAmendment.com is one of 25 blogs on the list released in December.

"Since 2007, the ABA Journal has helped shine a light on the stunning breadth of legal topics and voices to be found in the legal blogosphere," editor and publisher Molly McDonough said in a news release. "Journal editors have selected yet another stellar list of blogs, while recognizing the contributions of podcasts and social media."

Hall's blog is intended to supplement his two-volume textbook, Search and Seizure, first published in 1992 and now in its fifth edition from Lexis Law Press.

The publisher describes the treatise as "the only book of its kind written by an active trial lawyer for other active trial lawyers and judges. [It] addresses the types of issues that busy practitioners and judges encounter every day."

A print supplement of about 300 pages is published annually, and Hall said he started the blog to keep up with the flow of court rulings on Fourth Amendment issues. Otherwise, he'd have to devote a couple of months every year to compiling court rulings for the printed supplement, Hall said.

"I realized when I was working on the first supplement that this was an insurmountable task because there's so much case law," he said. "If I didn't keep up every day, I couldn't do it."

Twitter users described the blog as reader friendly and useful.

"I honestly don't know where he finds the time, but I don't know what I'd do without it," Atlanta attorney Andrew Fleischman wrote recently.

Orin Kerr, a law professor at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law and an authority on computer crime and Internet surveillance, described Hall's work as an "invaluable" resource.

The blog doesn't accept comments or feature any advertising because managing those features would take up too much time, Hall said.

Keeping FourthAmendment.com current typically takes two hours on weekdays, usually from 5 to 7 a.m., but the work can fill up the weekend when the demands of his "day job" keep him away from it too long, Hall said.

An attorney since 1973, Hall's clients have included Mike Maggio, the Faulkner County circuit judge imprisoned for taking bribes, and Tony Alamo, the child-molesting cult leader.

A past president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, he defended Satan in a federal lawsuit about school Halloween celebrations in Arkansas in 1986.

Metro on 01/17/2018

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