“Among other things, the judge asked whether the bank should be suing Dynadot and Wikileaks at all, whether a ‘right to privacy trumps the freedom of access to information…’”

Not quite (lazy blogger). Judge White was framing the question about privacy vs. disclosure. And he followed that question with a trio of precedents where privacy did trump access, adding:

“How do the amici respond to the court’s holding in Virgil v. Time, Inc., 527 F.2d 1122, 11228 (9th Cir. 1975), in which the Ninth Circuit held that ‘the public’s right to know is, then, subject to reasonable limitation so far as concerns the private facts of its individual members’? Is the private financial information of Plaintiffs’ customers privileged as newsworthy?”

There’s two camps. The Free Speech Absolutist crowd, in the tradition of Justice Hugo Black, pounds the First Amendment and shuts off all argument. The Free Speech Balance crowd understands that there are reasonable limitations, and that privacy is one of them. Remember: speech denied is speech deferred, while privacy breached is privacy broken.

In your Guardian column, you wanted to articulate a balance– between two separate cases. But my sense is that each case needs to be decided on its own. Not that anyone has done a good job of explaining just what is in the Baer documents; I read several press accounts, and no one quoted a tax-shelter expert investigator who said “this is a smoking gun.” Then again, no one has anyone explained the privacy implications either.

Well, write Congresswoman Lofgren, who represents Silicon Valley, and who’s on the Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property. They’re in fact having a hearing tomorrow — on patent reform. (I know that Lessig doesn’t have his heart in this, but I wish that some cyberlawyer could sit in on the hearings.)

So, I dunno, maybe an investigation of a federal judge should take precedence. There’s only been 13 federal judges impeached in our history, and 7 convicted. And these are for high crimes and misdemeanors– bribery, corruption. Only one was removed for a ruling; you’d have to go back to Thomas Pickering in 1799 for that.

I’m not a lawyer either. But as a I understand, judges make bad decisions all the time without the need for Congress to investigate. The decisions get appealed and overturned.