Taking blogger subpoenas to new depths

Sam Bayard at the Citizen Media Law Project:

In perhaps the most blatant misuse of the subpoena power we've seen since the subpoena served on Kathleen Seidel of Neurodiversity last March, a lawyer for Thomas Garrett of Virginia has served a patently overbroad subpoena on blogger Waldo Jaquith, who publishes cvillenews.com, a community news blog about Charlottesville, Virginia.

Garrett's lawyer served the subpoena in connection with his defamation lawsuit against The Hook, a weekly newspaper in Charlottesville that also publishes content on its website. Garrett, a chicken farmer and Hollywood publicist (who knew such a combination existed?) sued the newspaper after it published a series of articles covering state criminal proceedings against him (he pled guilty to a "minor count akin to trespassing" according to his complaint in the defamation case). For more information on the lawsuit, see our database entry, Garrett v. The Hook.

Read the whole post, and the comments, to get a sense of what's going on out there. Besides the chicken farmer / publicist part. Hat tip to Walter Olson..