I think journalists and their sources is a great example of the limitations of law. In fact, I think all lawyers should be required to take a course in the limitations of law, but that's another matter. You cannot - and should not - be able to define what is a journalist. It creates a dangerous box in which the agents for the fourth estate can be contained and so, eventually, controlled. If you cannot say what is and is not a journalist, does this mean a greater evil is bestowed in that journalists' don't have rights? No. The strength of the confidential source stems not from law but from culture. In the UK - where the laws refer to the story and to the press but not to the person that does the writing - judges are extraordinarily wary about ever requesting the source of a story. Why? Because it is a very deeply held belief that a journalist will never divulge their source, that there is a much wider and more important issue than that one journalist and their one source. I was - and still am - prepared in a heart-beat to go to jail to protect the identity of the sources of my various stories (not that that situation is likely to occur). And it is that culture - and the odd person put in jail by a judge, which then creates a storm of protest by the media - that makes judges shy away. Nothing to do with laws, all to do with pragmatic judging. In the US, where there is the First Amendment and countless other protections and safeguards the situation is, ironically, weaker, I would argue because US journalists expect some kind of automatic protection. Creating a new law would simply increase this sense that the law can decide this sort of situation. It can't though because the gaining of confidential information is by its nature already legally circumspect. People do it anyway. If journalists want to protect their sources, they need to build the culture of refusing ever to divulge. In the recent case in the US, the journalists failed themselves by finding various ways of saying who their source was. Yes, they were put under pressure, but then that was the test. If they had refused point blank - all of them - and all taken jail time and all refused for a second to discuss it, the outcry would have been enormous, the judge lambasted, the journalists let out and then you have a big precedent that journalists would draw inspiration from and judges would be wary of in future. Calling for a new law is the wrong way around to my mind. Kieren