Lawfare Daily: Dockets Die in Darkness with Peter Beck and Seamus Hughes
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 11 February 2026
⏱️ 33 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In his recent piece for Court Watch, a news site covering interesting, yet often overlooked federal court filings, Lawfare Associate Editor Peter Beck wrote about the Middle District of Georgia, which is “filled with rich news stories that even a few years ago would have been quickly reported” but which “now sits in a so-called ‘news desert,’ a place that is largely devoid of even a single newspaper, let alone a reporter dedicated to its federal court.”
Out of Georgia’s 17 counties without a single local news source, 12 fall within the Middle District of Georgia’s jurisdiction. Unfortunately, this district is not alone in this regard, writes Beck, but rather “part of a broader trend of the death of local news, leaving community members uninformed about important developments in their neighborhoods and leading to less and less transparency in the legal system.”
For today’s episode, Lawfare Managing Editor Tyler McBrien sits down with Beck, as well as Seamus Hughes, a senior research faculty at the University of Nebraska Omaha’s National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology, and Education Center (NCITE) and the founder of Court Watch, to discuss what happens when “dockets die in darkness.”
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | We're not going to be able to cover that with a two-man shop, right? |
| 0:04.7 | And no other small startup is going to either, which means things happen, right? |
| 0:09.6 | It means that when your reporter's laptop and phone gets seized because they're doing an investigation to leak in a classified information, maybe you don't have a lawyer around to fight that back. |
| 0:21.6 | It's the Lawfare podcast. I'm Tyler McBrion, managing editor of Lawfare, with Peter Beck, |
| 0:28.0 | an associate editor at Lawfare, and a reporter with Court Watch, as well as Seamus Hughes, |
| 0:33.7 | a senior research faculty at the University of Nebraska-Omaha's National Counterterrorism,terrorism Innovation, Technology, and Education Center, and the founder of Court Watch. |
| 0:43.1 | This is a little bit of an opportunity in that we see the government and the Justice Department become less transparent. |
| 0:50.0 | And if I were a public defender or I were a defense attorney, |
| 0:54.3 | I'd really be thinking about my relationships with journalists |
| 0:57.3 | and reaching out to them and wanting to kind of let them hear what's going on when I think that they should. |
| 1:05.6 | Today we're talking about Peter's recent piece called Dockets Die in Darkness |
| 1:09.8 | and what the slow death of local |
| 1:11.8 | newsrooms means for legal journalism. So Peter, I want to start with you. I think many of our |
| 1:17.3 | listeners will be unfortunately all too familiar with the trend that journalism in general and |
| 1:24.0 | especially local news has been trending, which is to say downward for, you know, |
| 1:28.6 | quite some years now. But maybe listeners will have thought less about how this trend specifically |
| 1:35.3 | affects legal journalism and the coverage of dockets. You've coined or perhaps one of you has |
| 1:41.7 | coined this trend as dockets die in darkness. So, Peter, can you just sort of set the scene here this trend as dockets die in darkness. So Peter, can you just |
| 1:45.6 | sort of set the scene here? What does dockets die in darkness mean? And what were you trying to |
| 1:50.8 | highlight with this recent piece in court watch? Yeah. So when it comes to legal journalism, |
| 1:58.1 | and there are certainly a lot of great legal reporters out there in the U.S., |
| 2:02.8 | but there's a lot of emphasis on kind of what we think of as the larger district. So |
... |
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