Boring image, but it’s just there to support the text. I tweeted something about this paper during the week, but tweets are so ephemeral. There is a law review article I recently came across that addresses the unnecessary conflicts between photographers and law enforcement. It is titled: Less than Picture Perfect: The Legal Relationship between Photographers’ Rights and Law Enforcement, 78 Tenn. L. Rev. 105 (2010).  You can find the abstract for the paper, and download the entire article as a pdf at this link.

Being a law review article, it’s a scholarly work, but I think non-lawyers could follow most of it. It acts as a good guide to the current status of the law, with plenty of examples and real life stories included. The author also addresses possible remedies that photographers who are wrongly harassed by law enforcement might have based on existing law, and finds most of them lacking, so she proposes alternatives. The alternatives would likely require new legislation.

The article was written by Morgan Lee Manning, who is apparently a newly minted attorney in private practice, and who was helped by Glenn Reynolds, a law professor at the University of Tennessee, and proprietor of the blog Instapundit, which is a popular law, politics and public policy blog (with some occasional technology news and commentary thrown in). If you search his site for the phrase “war on photography” you will find a wealth of links to relevant information on the issue.

NOTE: I slightly revised this post later the same day to clarify some points.