Twitter Anarchist has his Day in Court

A few weeks ago we discussed the plight of the twitter anarchist, a man who during "September’s G-20 gathering of world leaders in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania" was "arrested on September 24 at a motel room for allegedly listening to a police scanner and relaying information on Twitter to help protesters avoid heavily-armed cops" according to Wired.

At that time we discussed whether the Twitter Anarchist was simply performing a morally necessary task of publicizing legal rules to help others avoid finding themselves in violation of laws that didn't exist a short time before. In that case, the Twitter Anarchist might defend himself on either traditional or modern natural law grounds that the law requires promulgation to be legitimate. The Wired article on the case brings up another point, claiming that "a closer look at the court documents leaves the unmistakable impression that Elliott Madison is yet another casualty of the government’s nasty, post-9/11 habit of considering political dissidents to be threats to national security."

This seems to be an argument based on realist claims that legal officials make decisions about rules not on either moral grounds or logical deductions from statute, but in light of a half-conscious understanding of social need. Consequently, the Twitter Anarchist's lawyer, Martin Stolar, has argued that "the warrant’s vagueness and lack of specificity encouraged the agents to use their own discretion and their own views of the political universe to seize, or not to seize, items which they thought were evidence of a violation of the federal anti-riot statute" thus violating his client's constitutional rights and constituting a social harm that judges should weigh against their own views of social need in evaluating the case.

Realists might find this case interesting for many reasons:

1. There is the question of the social effects produced by vague or indeterminate statutes and whether legal officials should take those effects into account when adjudicating or enforcing such statutes.
2. There is the question of whether the social effects of even plainly worded, unambiguous statutes should be considered by judges and other legal officials since they are based at least partially on some official's determination of social need.
   
3. Finally, and this is more of a theoretical question, there is the question of how considerations of social interests are similar to or differ from moral considerations and why one might prefer one to the other.