As Judith Miller wakes up from her first night in jail, we are moved to offer our own modest salute among the many that will be raised this day. She is one of the most admirable newspaperwomen of her generation. This has been known to readers of the New York Times for years, and it has not been diminished a whit by the controversy and caviling, including in the Times itself, over her reporting on the search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq or the consternation that has resulted among the glitterati of Manhattan as she has bored in on the oil-for-food scandal at the United Nations.

And it needn’t be diminished in the least by the controversy over the kind of sourcing agreements reporters should or shouldn’t be permitted to make as they pursue the news here in America. Our own view is that, as a general matter, newspapermen and women would be wise to be extremely chary of making agreements that might bind them to disobey a lawful court order. But we’ve experienced enough of the kind of judgments one has to make on or off deadline to be chary of second-guessing Ms. Miller’s decisions.

The notion that Ms. Miller acted contemptuously of the court was belied by her comments in court yesterday, when she addressed Judge Hogan’s warning about anarchy. “I have chronicled,” she said, “what happens on the dark side of the world when the law is an arbitrary foil that serves the powerful, in Iraq under Saddam Hussein, for instance, in Syria, in Iran, and in the former Soviet Union. I do not take our freedom for granted.” We don’t think she meant to suggest American law was an arbitrary foil, on the contrary, just that she wasn’t contemptuous of the court.

Judith Miller may be in jail this morning, but she has got the better of the federal prosecutor – and judge, for that matter – who put her there. It may be that in America, no person is above the law. But from time to time, it turns out that the law is, as Dickens famously said once in England, an ass, and this is clearly one of them. We can’t say we exactly enjoyed getting scooped by Ms. Miller, but she doesn’t belong in prison. And the sooner the custodians of our laws manage to find a way to get her out and back at her typewriter, the better for our republic.