Contributors
As a boy, attorney Bob Levin was a devotee of EC horror comics, but when the Comics Code Authority killed off those titles, he gave up on comic books for almost 30 years. He returned to his early passion when he began writing profiles of obscure artists for The Comics Journal. Though workers' compensation litigation is his bread and butter, Levin was fascinated by the war between free speech and intellectual property set off by the underground artists who called themselves the Air Pirates, whom he calls "a wild and wooly bunch even by the standards of San Francisco in the '70s." They became the subject of his book The Pirates and the Mouse, excerpted on page 20.
After helping launch The New York Times on the Web and reporting on tech policy for American Banker, Drew Clark jumped at a chance to join National Journal's Technology Daily in 1998. In August he got together with Reason's Nick Gillespie and Jesse Walker to interview Federal Communications Commission Chairman Michael Powell ("The Reluctant Planner," page 30). Clark's 1989 reason story about the end of apartheid in South Africa, where he was a reporter for the Johannesburg Weekly Mail & Guardian, garnered a Mencken Award from the Free Press Association. He also blogs at DrewClark.com and occasionally unplugs long enough to run a marathon.
As a young law professor at the University of Wyoming, Eric Muller was unsettled when his constitutional law students didn't object to the Korematsu decision, which approved the World War II internment of Japanese Americans. Determined to engage them, he began to research the internment. One result was his 2001 book Free to Die for Their Country: The Story of the Japanese American Draft Resisters in World War II. Another was a debate at his weblog, isthatlegal.org, with internment defender Michelle Malkin, whose book on the subject he reviews in this issue ("Indefensible," page 59). Now a professor at the University of North Carolina, Muller is writing a second book on the relationship between law and loyalty.