Under the plain language of New York's third-degree forgery statute, many of President Donald Trump's Twitter followers, the author of the Federalist Papers and others who have used pseudonyms could be prosecuted, an attorney for blogger and disbarred lawyer Raphael Golb argued Friday before a federal appeals court.

Such a broad reading would be unworkable, even absurd, attorney Ronald Kuby said in argument to a federal appeals panel.

Golb, the son of Norman Golb, a University of Chicago professor and Dead Sea Scrolls scholar, was convicted in 2010 in a state court of 30 counts for using aliases on the Internet as part of a campaign to discredit the work of his father's academic rivals.