PHILADELPHIA, PA—Early this morning, attorneys representing Free Speech Coalition and 15 other plaintiffs, as well as the U.S. Department of Justice attorneys representing Attorney General Eric Holder, filed post-trial briefs in the matter of Free Speech Coalition, et al. v. Holder, the case challenging the federal recordkeeping and labeling act(s), 18 U.S.C. §§2257 and 2257A, whose trial ended on June 17. And though presiding Judge Michael Baylson had suggested that such briefs be as short as possible, since he intends to render a verdict before the end of this month, both sides turned in whoppers anyway: 81 pages for the plaintiffs, and a massive 151 pages for the defense.
While attorneys J. Michael Murray and Lorraine Baumgardner incorporated into their main brief the list of questions which the court specifically asked to have answered in the post-trial briefs, the government, through seven DOJ attorneys including the four who actually tried the case—Kathryn Wyer, Nathan Swinton, Hector Bladuell and James Schwartz—filed a main brief, a second brief entitled "Defendant's Proposed Findings of Fact," and a third brief entitled, "Defendant's Answers to Court's Questions of June 14, 2013."
The plaintiffs' brief is extensively cross-referenced so that the court can easily search for arguments referencing any particular plaintiff, each argument being made for striking the statute down, each prior decision impacting any of the plaintiffs' arguments, and where each portion of both the 2257 and 2257A statutes, as well as each portion of the regulations allegedly derived from those statutes, can be found in the brief's text.
The government, on the other hand, has submitted its main brief in the usual style, with a list of arguments to be covered, and a list of prior cases referenced with the page numbers of where those cases are referred to. However, there appears to be no cross-referecning between any of the defendant's three briefs, which may make it a bit more difficult for the court to follow and find support for the arguments being made.
AVN will be posting extensive analyses of all of these documents later today, so check back with AVN.com for more information about this important development in the 2257 case.
