Digital Commons Network^™

Panel One: Classification And Access To National Security Information, Mary-Rose Papandrea, Margaret Kwoka, David Pozen, Stephen I. Vladeck

Faculty Scholarship

This article is a transcript of the first panel of First Amendment Law Review’s 2021 Symposium on National Security, Whistleblowers, and the First Amendment, discussing classification and access to national security information.

Speech And Exercise By Private Individuals And Organizations, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

A central issue about redundancy concerns how far the exercise of religion is simply a form of speech that is, and should be, constitutionally protected only to the extent that reaches speech generally. Insofar as a constitutional analysis leaves flexibility, we have questions about wise legislative choices. To consider these issues carefully, we need to have a sense of what counts as relevant speech and the exercise of religion. That is the focus of this article.

It addresses the basic categorization of what counts as “speech” for freedom of speech and what counts as religious exercise when each is engaged …

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 …

The Search For An Egalitarian First Amendment, Jeremy K. Kessler, David E. Pozen

Faculty Scholarship

Over the past decade, the Roberts Court has handed down a series of rulings that demonstrate the degree to which the First Amendment can be used to thwart economic and social welfare regulation – generating widespread accusations that the Court has created a "new Lochner." This introduction to the Columbia Law Review's Symposium on Free Expression in an Age of Inequality takes up three questions raised by these developments: Why has First Amendment law become such a prominent site for struggles over socioeconomic inequality? Does the First Amendment tradition contain egalitarian elements that could be recovered? And what might a …

Reading Holmes Through The Lens Of Schauer: The Abrams Dissent, Vincent A. Blasi

Faculty Scholarship

Even the best scholars rarely persuade. Mostly, they illuminate. They make us more discerning readers and interlocutors.

Here I want to illustrate how Frederick Schauer's work on the law of free speech can help us to read what may be the single most influential judicial opinion ever written on that subject, Justice Holmes's famous dissent in Abrams v. United States. So far as I am aware, Schauer has not produced anything like a line-by-line parsing of the Holmes opinion. I claim nevertheless that a reader familiar with Schauer's ideas is far better prepared on that account to understand what Holmes …

Insults And Epithets: Are They Protected Speech?, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

It is a privilege to offer a lecture in this series named for Edward J. Bloustein. Not many lecture series honor sitting university presidents who deliver the first lecture in the series; but President Bloustein is the very rare president whose long tenure in office has been accompanied by continuing academic productivity. That achievement is remarkable.

When I tentatively chose this topic a year ago, I knew it involved the application of philosophical insights to serious practical questions, the kind of work that President Bloustein has done so well. I also knew that the search for those aspects of human …

O'Er The Land Of The Free: Flag Burning As Speech, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

I am honored to lecture at this school, which has a number of friends, and a much larger circle of scholars whose work I admire. I am honored to lecture in the memory of Melville Nimmer, one of the country's leading thinkers on freedom of speech as well as its foremost expert on copyright. I met Professor Nimmer only once, at a lunch with Vince Blasi. My recollection of the lunch is distinct. Gently and in the most friendly way, but with irrefutable logic, they showed me that a position I had held for more than a decade about immigration …

The Tolerant Society: A Response To Critics, Lee C. Bollinger

Faculty Scholarship

In writing The Tolerant Society I was, and yet remain, interested in the treatment of speech behavior in this country, a treatment notably more liberal than in other Western democracies. Liberality, however, is not its only surprising or distinguishing hallmark; so too is how the world is characterized under the free speech concept.

For some time, even after I began teaching in the first amendment area, the scope and nature of protection afforded speech seemed to me obviously right. But the more I thought about it, the more it seemed to me quite extraordinary. Existing free speech theory provided less …

The Future And The First Amendment, Lee C. Bollinger

Faculty Scholarship

It is my honor and pleasure to deliver this year's Sullivan Lecture. I have an especially warm feeling toward this Law School. Two years ago, at the invitation of your Professor Distelhorst, I participated in the Capital Law School program for teaching American law to Japanese lawyers. For five stimulating weeks I enjoyed the intellectual and social company· of Japanese attorneys, while teaching them the outlines of American constitutional law. Twice a week, in the evening, for three continuous hours, and after a full work day, these dedicated lawyers would willingly become students again and suffer patiently through my highly …

The First Amendment And The Ideal Of Civic Courage: The Brandeis Opinion In Whitney V. California, Vincent A. Blasi

Faculty Scholarship

"[T]he working class and the employing class have nothing in common ....” So began the Preamble to the Constitution of the I.W.W., the Industrial Workers of the World. "Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the World organize as a class, take possession of the earth, and the machinery of production and abolish the wage system." Nicknamed the Wobblies, this group advocated a form of militant unionism built around the ideal of One Big Union embracing all industries. The I.W.W. enjoyed its strongest appeal among the miners, loggers, agricultural laborers, and construction workers of …

The Teaching Function Of The First Amendment, Vincent A. Blasi

Faculty Scholarship

In this important book, Professor Bollinger seeks to understand and remedy the inadequacy he perceives in the way our legal culture deals with extremist speech. He argues that the high level of protection the first amendment has been construed to require serves a social function that has not been fully recognized or carefully evaluated. His thesis is that the contemporary social function of the idea of freedom of speech is to help the society develop a general capacity for tolerance, a capacity that determines how we respond to many forms of conduct as well as speech. Once this function is …

Religious Convictions And Lawmaking, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

In this Article, presented as the 1985-86 Thomas M. Cooley Lectures at the University of Michigan School of Law on March 10-12, 1986, Professor Greenawalt addresses the role that religious conviction properly plays in the liberal citizen's political decisionmaking in a liberal democratic society. Rejecting the notion that all political questions can be decided on rational secular grounds, Professor Greenawalt argues that the liberal democratic citizen may rely on his religious convictions when secular morality is unable to resolve issues critical to a political decision. The examples of animal rights and environmental protection, abortion, and welfare assistance illustrate situations where …