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Courting Censorship, Philip A. Hamburger
Courting Censorship, Philip A. Hamburger
Faculty Scholarship
Has Supreme Court doctrine invited censorship? Not deliberately, of course. Still, it must be asked whether current doctrine has courted censorship — in the same way one might speak of it courting disaster.
The Court has repeatedly declared its devotion to the freedom of speech, so the suggestion that its doctrines have failed to block censorship may seem surprising. The Court’s precedents, however, have left room for government suppression, even to the point of seeming to legitimize it.
This Article is especially critical of the state action doctrine best known from Blum v. Yaretsky. That doctrine mistakenly elevates coercion …
Autonomy And Disciplinarity: Can Pseudoprofessional Speakers Select Their Own Constitutional Categorization?, Joseph Blocher
Autonomy And Disciplinarity: Can Pseudoprofessional Speakers Select Their Own Constitutional Categorization?, Joseph Blocher
Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
The First Amendment And Algorithms, Stuart M. Benjamin
The First Amendment And Algorithms, Stuart M. Benjamin
Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
"The Road I Can't Help Travelling": Holmes On Truth And Persuadability, Joseph Blocher
"The Road I Can't Help Travelling": Holmes On Truth And Persuadability, Joseph Blocher
Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Free Speech And Justified True Belief, Joseph Blocher
Free Speech And Justified True Belief, Joseph Blocher
Faculty Scholarship
Law often prioritizes justified true beliefs. Evidence, even if probative and correct, must have a proper foundation. Expert witness testimony must be the product of reliable principles and methods. Prosecutors are not permitted to trick juries into convicting a defendant, even if that defendant is truly guilty. Judges’ reasons, and not just the correctness of their holdings, are the engines of precedent. Lawyers are, in short, familiar with the notion that one must be right for the right reasons.
And yet the standard epistemic theory of the First Amendment—that the marketplace of ideas is the “best test of truth”—has generally …
Learned Hand's Seven Other Ideas About The Freedom Of Speech, Vincent A. Blasi
Learned Hand's Seven Other Ideas About The Freedom Of Speech, Vincent A. Blasi
Faculty Scholarship
I say “other” because, regarding the freedom of speech, Learned Hand has suffered the not uncommon fate of having his best ideas either drowned out or credited exclusively to others due to the excessive attention that has been bestowed on one of his lesser ideas. Sitting as a district judge in the case of Masses Publishing Co. v. Patten, Hand wrote the earliest judicial opinion about the freedom of speech that has attained canonical status. He ruled that under the recently passed Espionage Act of 1917, writings critical of government cannot be grounds for imposing criminal punishment or the …
Rights Skepticism And Majority Rule At The Birth Of The Modern First Amendment, Vincent A. Blasi
Rights Skepticism And Majority Rule At The Birth Of The Modern First Amendment, Vincent A. Blasi
Faculty Scholarship
Learned Hand, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Louis Brandeis all had the same problem. They were troubled — Holmes less than the others and later, but eventually — by the widespread and mean-spirited persecution of dissenters they observed as the United States entered World War I and then reacted to the Bolshevik Revolution. Today, most persons so troubled would think that constitutional rights, and particularly the freedom of speech, exist for the very purpose of countermanding zealous political majorities that deny or neglect the claims of dissenters. But Hand, Holmes, and Brandeis, each by his own distinctive path, came to the …
Free Speech And Speaker's Intent: A Reply To Kendrick., Larry Alexander
Free Speech And Speaker's Intent: A Reply To Kendrick., Larry Alexander
Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
New Problems For Subsidized Speech, Joseph Blocher
New Problems For Subsidized Speech, Joseph Blocher
Faculty Scholarship
The constitutionality of conditional offers from the government is a transsubstantive issue with broad and growing practical implications, but it has always been a particular problem for free speech. Recent developments suggest at least three new approaches to the problem, but no easy solutions to it. The first approach would permit conditions that define the limits of the government spending program, while forbidding conditions that leverage funding so as to regulate speech outside the contours of the program. This is an appealing distinction, but runs into some of the same challenges as public forum analysis. The second approach would treat …
Common Sense And Key Questions, Stuart M. Benjamin
Common Sense And Key Questions, Stuart M. Benjamin
Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Hate Speech And The Demos, Jamal Greene
Hate Speech And The Demos, Jamal Greene
Faculty Scholarship
It is sometimes said that the statist and aristocratic traditions of Europe render its political institutions less democratic than those of the United States. Richard Posner writes of “the less democratic cast of European politics, as a result of which elite opinion is more likely to override public opinion than it is in the United States.” If that is true, then there are obvious ways in which it figures into debates over the wisdom of hate-speech regulation. The standard European argument in favor of such regulation may easily be characterized as antidemocratic: Restrictions on hate speech protect unpopular minority groups …
Nonsense And The Freedom Of Speech: What Meaning Means For The First Amendment, Joseph Blocher
Nonsense And The Freedom Of Speech: What Meaning Means For The First Amendment, Joseph Blocher
Faculty Scholarship
A great deal of everyday expression is, strictly speaking, nonsense. But courts and scholars have done little to consider whether or why such meaningless speech, like nonrepresentational art, falls within “the freedom of speech.” If, as many suggest, meaning is what separates speech from sound and expression from conduct, then the constitutional case for nonsense is complicated. And because nonsense is so common, the case is also important — artists like Lewis Carroll and Jackson Pollock are not the only putative “speakers” who should be concerned about the outcome.
This Article is the first to explore thoroughly the relationship between …
Implementing First Amendment Institutionalism, Joseph Blocher
Implementing First Amendment Institutionalism, Joseph Blocher
Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Algorithms And Speech, Stuart M. Benjamin
Algorithms And Speech, Stuart M. Benjamin
Faculty Scholarship
One of the central questions in free speech jurisprudence is what activities the First Amendment encompasses. This Article considers that question in the context of an area of increasing importance – algorithm-based decisions. I begin by looking to broadly accepted legal sources, which for the First Amendment means primarily Supreme Court jurisprudence. That jurisprudence provides for very broad First Amendment coverage, and the Court has reinforced that breadth in recent cases. Under the Court’s jurisprudence the First Amendment (and the heightened scrutiny it entails) would apply to many algorithm-based decisions, specifically those entailing substantive communications. We could of course adopt …
La Interseccion De La Responsabilidad Extracontractual Y El Derecho Constitucional Y Los Derechos Humanos, George C. Christie
La Interseccion De La Responsabilidad Extracontractual Y El Derecho Constitucional Y Los Derechos Humanos, George C. Christie
Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Analogies And Institutions In The First And Second Amendments: A Response To Professor Magarian, Darrell A.H. Miller
Analogies And Institutions In The First And Second Amendments: A Response To Professor Magarian, Darrell A.H. Miller
Faculty Scholarship
In this essay, Professor Darrell Miller responds to Professor Gregory Magarian's criticism of the manner in which judges, advocates, and scholars have used the First Amendment to frame Second Amendment interpretive questions.
First Amendment Protection For Union Appeals To Consumers, Michael C. Harper
First Amendment Protection For Union Appeals To Consumers, Michael C. Harper
Faculty Scholarship
This article explains why decisions of the National Labor Relations Board under President Obama holding non-picketing secondary appeals to consumers not to be illegal under the National Labor Relations Act were necessary under a 1988 decision of the Supreme Court, Edward J. DeBartolo Corp. v. Florida Gulf Coast Building & Construction Trades Council. The article also explains why both the Supreme Court decision and the Board’s recent decisions were compelled by the first amendment and could not be based on the language of § 8(b)(4)(ii)(B) of the National Labor Relations Act as interpreted by the Court in other cases. The …
Public Discourse, Expert Knowledge, And The Press, Joseph Blocher
Public Discourse, Expert Knowledge, And The Press, Joseph Blocher
Faculty Scholarship
This Essay identifies and elaborates two complications raised by Robert Post’s Democracy, Expertise, and Academic Freedom, and in doing so attempts to show how Post’s theory can account for constitutional protection of the press. The first complication is a potential circularity arising from the relationships between the concepts of democratic legitimation, public discourse, and protected social practices. Democratic legitimation predicates First Amendment coverage on participation in public discourse, whose boundaries are defined as those social practices necessary for the formation of public opinion. But close examination of the relationships between these three concepts raises the question of whether public discourse …
Sorrell V. Ims Health And The End Of The Constitutional Double Standard, Ernest A. Young
Sorrell V. Ims Health And The End Of The Constitutional Double Standard, Ernest A. Young
Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Second Things First: What Free Speech Can And Can’T Say About Guns, Joseph Blocher
Second Things First: What Free Speech Can And Can’T Say About Guns, Joseph Blocher
Faculty Scholarship
Professor Blocher responds to Gregory Magarian’s article on the implications of the First Amendment for the Second.
Money Talks But It Isn't Speech, Deborah Hellman
Money Talks But It Isn't Speech, Deborah Hellman
Faculty Scholarship
This Article challenges the central premise of our campaign finance law, namely that restrictions on giving and spending money constitute restrictions on speech and thus can only be justified by compelling governmental interests. This claim has become so embedded in constitutional doctrine that in the most recent Supreme Court case in this area, Citizens United v. FEC, the majority asserts it without discussion or argument. This claim is often defended on the grounds that money is important or necessary for speech. While money surely facilitates speech, money also facilitates the exercise of many other constitutional rights. By looking at these …
Democratic Participation And The Freedom Of Speech: A Response To Post And Weinstein Responses, Vincent A. Blasi
Democratic Participation And The Freedom Of Speech: A Response To Post And Weinstein Responses, Vincent A. Blasi
Faculty Scholarship
I think it is useful to search for a theory that has as one of its justifications its superior fit with either the case law or the fundamental commitments and shared understandings of the political community, preferably with both. So even if someone were to convince me that she has in hand a normatively superior theory of free speech, whether grounded in the commitment to democracy or otherwise, I would still be interested in what Professors Post and Weinstein are trying to do.
Seana Shiffrin's Thinker-Based Freedom Of Speech: A Response, Vincent A. Blasi
Seana Shiffrin's Thinker-Based Freedom Of Speech: A Response, Vincent A. Blasi
Faculty Scholarship
As an instinctive consequentialist so far as First Amendment theory is concerned, I have to admit that I have never been so tempted by a non-consequentialist account as I am by what Professor Shiffrin has produced. My principal interest is the history of ideas regarding the freedom of speech. I have long been struck by how so many of the canonical writers on the subject have built their arguments from the starting point of the central importance of the freedom of thought. This is true of Milton and Mill in a basic, explicit, straightforward way (if Milton can ever be …
Viewpoint Neutrality And Government Speech, Joseph Blocher
Viewpoint Neutrality And Government Speech, Joseph Blocher
Faculty Scholarship
Government speech creates a paradox at the heart of the First Amendment. To satisfy traditional First Amendment tests, the government must show that it is not discriminating against a viewpoint. And yet if the government shows that it is condemning or supporting a viewpoint, it may be able to invoke the government speech defense and thereby avoid constitutional scrutiny altogether. Government speech doctrine therefore rewards what the rest of the First Amendment forbids: viewpoint discrimination against private speech. This is both a theoretical puzzle and an increasingly important practical problem. In cases like Pleasant Grove City, Utah v. Summum, the …
Transforming Property Into Speech, Joseph Blocher
Transforming Property Into Speech, Joseph Blocher
Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Crisis In The Legal Profession: Don’T Mourn, Organize!, Michael E. Tigar
Crisis In The Legal Profession: Don’T Mourn, Organize!, Michael E. Tigar
Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Unshackling Speech (Book Review), David L. Lange
Unshackling Speech (Book Review), David L. Lange
Faculty Scholarship
Reviewing, Brian C. Anderson and Adam D. Thierer, A Manifesto for Media Freedom (2008))
The First Amendment's Original Sin, Lee C. Bollinger
The First Amendment's Original Sin, Lee C. Bollinger
Faculty Scholarship
Times of war place considerable stress on civil liberties, especially ones protected by the First Amendment. When the nation must gather itself to fight an enemy who is intent on killing us, it is perhaps only natural that our tolerance for the usual disorder of dissent will decline. When everyone has to sacrifice for the common good, when fellow citizens are dying in that cause, the costs of speech are visible and serious. Dissent may dissuade or discourage soldiers from fighting; sowing doubt may weaken resolve just when it's needed most; falsehoods and misinformation may lead to catastrophic shifts of …
Civil Rights And Civil Liberties: Whose “Rule Of Law”?, William W. Van Alstyne
Civil Rights And Civil Liberties: Whose “Rule Of Law”?, William W. Van Alstyne
Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
To What Extent Does The Power Of Government To Determine The Boundaries And Conditions Of Lawful Commerce Permit Government To Declare Who May Advertise And Who May Not?, William W. Van Alstyne
To What Extent Does The Power Of Government To Determine The Boundaries And Conditions Of Lawful Commerce Permit Government To Declare Who May Advertise And Who May Not?, William W. Van Alstyne
Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.