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Cross Burning, Hate Speech, And Free Speech In America, Edward J. Eberle

Law Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Not For Attribution: Government's Interest In Protecting The Integrity Of Its Own Expression, Helen L. Norton

Faculty Scholarship

Public entities increasingly maintain that the First Amendment permits them to ensure that private speakers’ views are not mistakenly attributed to the government. Consider, for example, Virginia’s efforts to ban the Sons of Confederate Veterans’ display of the Confederate flag logo on state-sponsored specialty license plates. Seeking to remain neutral in the ongoing debate over whether the Confederate flag is a symbol of “hate” or “heritage,” Virginia argued that the state would be wrongly perceived as endorsing the flag if the logo appeared on a state-issued plate adorned by the identifier “VIRGINIA.” The Fourth Circuit was unpersuaded, holding that the …

Changing Channels And Bridging Divides: The Failure And Redemption Of American Broadcast Television Regulation, Anthony E. Varona

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

In Changing Channels and Bridging Divides: The Failure and Redemption of American Broadcast Television Regulation Professor Varona analyzes how the Supreme Court, Congress and the FCC have defined the legal duties of commercial broadcasters throughout the maturation of the television industry. First, he shows how the public trustee doctrine has failed, with broadcasters today airing very little 'public interest' programming. Second, he examines how and why the FCC has failed to effectively elucidate and enforce the public trustee doctrine, focusing on the irreconcilable First Amendment and commercial tensions inherent in the public trustee doctrine since its inception and the 'capture' …

Speech And Strife, Robert L. Tsai

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

The essay strives for a better understanding of the myths, symbols, categories of power, and images deployed by the Supreme Court to signal how we ought to think about its authority. Taking examples from free speech jurisprudence, the essay proceeds in three steps. First, Tsai argues that the First Amendment constitutes a deep source of cultural authority for the Court. As a result, linguistic and doctrinal innovation in the free speech area have been at least as bold and imaginative as that in areas like the Commerce Clause. Second, in turning to cognitive theory, he distinguishes between formal legal argumentation …

Copyright And Free Expression: Analyzing The Convergence Of Conflicting Normative Frameworks, Shyamkrishna Balganesh

Faculty Scholarship

Recent attempts to expand the domain of copyright law in different parts of the world have necessitated renewed efforts to evaluate the philosophical justifications that are advocated for its existence as an independent institution. Copyright, conceived of as a proprietary institution, reveals an interesting philosophical interaction with other libertarian interests, most notably the right to free expression. This paper seeks to understand the nature of this interaction and the resulting normative decisions. The paper seeks to analyse copyright law and its recent expansions, specifically from the perspective of the human rights discourse. It looks at the historical origins of modern …

Rethinking Copyright Misuse, Kathryn Judge

Faculty Scholarship

Over the last few decades, copyright has evolved in dramatic and unprecedented ways. At the heart of this evolution lies a series of changes in the statutory scheme that have substantially expanded copyright's scope. There has also been a rise in private ordering as copyright holders increasingly use licenses to govern use of their copyrighted material and thereby supplant the default terms prescribed by the Copyright Act. Mediating and contributing to this evolution has been the judiciary. The judiciary has long played an active role in protecting copyright policy, and the dynamism of the last thirty years has only accentuated …

The Freedom To Speak And The Freedom To Listen: The Admissibility Of The Criminal Defendant's Taste In Entertainment, Helen A. Anderson

Articles

In Part I of this Article, I will establish that the First Amendment protects both consumers and producers of expression, although the scope of consumer protection has not been greatly elaborated. Part II discusses attempts to hold the entertainment industry liable for crimes by third persons, as well as legislative efforts to restrict or ban certain kinds of entertainment or art deemed to cause violence. For the most part, these efforts against producers have failed.

Part III then shows how a criminal defendant's viewing, listening, or reading habits may be used as evidence against that defendant, and that the constitutional …

School Board Control Over Education And A Teacher's Right To Privacy, Ralph Mawdsley

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

Privacy as a protected right for employees in the United States is grounded in several constitutional provisions. Most generally, the notion of privacy is associated with confidentiality of information , which is protected under both the Liberty Clause of the Constitution's Fourteenth Amendment and the Fourth Amendment's protection from unreasonable searches and seizures. However, an expanded understanding of privacy can find protection under the concepts of the right of association protected under the Liberty Clause and the First Amendment, expression of ideas under the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment, and practice of one's religious beliefs under the Free …

O Say, Can You See: Free Expression By The Light Of Fiery Crosses, Jeannine Bell

Articles by Maurer Faculty

This Article presents a comprehensive, context-based theory which both places cross burning in its proper doctrinal framework and recognizes the history of cross burning as one of Ku Klux Klan-inspired terrorism directed at African Americans. The author prefaces critical commentary on the Supreme Court's decision in Virginia v. Black with analysis of the full landscape of cross burning cases including another issue to which others have paid little attention - the ways in which state courts have negotiated First Amendment challenges to cross burning statutes. Thoroughly examining cross burning from each of these perspectives, the Article argues that cross burning …

Raiding Islam: Searches That Target Religious Institutions, John G. Douglass

Law Faculty Publications

On the morning of March 20, 2002, while television cameras recorded the events for the evening news, dozens of federal agents entered and searched the offices of several Islamic educational and religious organizations in Northern Virginia. The agents were searching, it appears, for evidence that those organizations contributed money to international groups known to have sponsored terrorist acts. By most public accounts, the targeted institutions were regarded as moderate and progressive voices in American Islam. For that reason, the searches sent shock waves through the American Muslim community. Muslims who had supported the Administration's domestic war on terrorism began to …

What Is The Sound Of A Corporation Speaking? How The Cognitive Theory Of Metaphor Can Help Lawyers Shape The Law, Linda L. Berger

Scholarly Works

This article argues that better understanding of metaphor's cognitive role can help lawyers shape judicial decision-making. As a way of exploring metaphor's contribution to shaping the law, the article focuses on how a particular lawsuit was influenced by metaphor, in particular, by the primary metaphor that a corporation is a person within the more complex metaphorical system suggested by the marketplace of ideas model for First Amendment protection. After describing the cognitive theory of metaphor and examining the metaphors underlying First Amendment protection for corporate speech, the article analyzes the use of metaphor in the briefs filed in the U.S. …

Toward A Constitutional Regulation Of Minors' Access To Harmful Internet Speech, Dawn C. Nunziato

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

In this article, I scrutinize Congress's recent efforts to regulate access to sexually-themed Internet speech. The first such effort, embodied in the Communications Decency Act, failed to take into account the Supreme Court's carefully-honed obscenity and obscenity-for-minors jurisprudence. The second, embodied in the Child Online Protection Act, attended carefully to Supreme Court precedent, but failed to account for the geographic variability in definitions of obscene speech. Finally, the recently-enacted Children's Internet Protection Act apparently remedies the constitutional deficiencies identified in these two prior legislative efforts, but runs the risk of being implemented in a manner that fails to protect either …

Fire, Metaphor, And Constitutional Myth-Making, Robert Tsai

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

From the standpoint of traditional legal thought, metaphor is at best a dash of poetry adorning lawyerly analysis, and at worst an unjustifiable distraction from what is actually at stake in a legal contest. By contrast, in the eyes of those who view law as a close relative of ordinary language, metaphor is a basic building block of human understanding. This article accepts that metaphor helps us to comprehend a court's decision. At the same time, it argues that metaphor plays a special role in the realm of constitutional discourse. Metaphor in constitutional law not only reinforces doctrinal categories, but …

Demythologizing The Legal History Of The Jehovah’S Witnesses And The First Amendment, Allen K. Rostron

Faculty Works

In 2002, for the first time in more than 20 years, the Supreme Court of the United States decided a case involving the First Amendment rights of Jehovah's Witnesses. The Court ruled that Witnesses cannot be required to give their names to local government authorities in order to obtain permits before going door-to-door to distribute their publications and preach their religious message.

While the amount of new law being generated by the religion's followers has slowed, scholars have finally begun in recent years to give significant attention to the legal history of the Jehovah's Witnesses, and, in particular, to their …

The Antipaternalism Principle In The First Amendment, Dale Carpenter

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Commentators generally agree the First Amendment is hostile to paternalism. Yet, most analysts invoke the idea of free speech antipaternalism without examining its roots, explaining what it means, or discussing what it entails. There has been no attempt to identify and to explain the antipaternalism principle across a variety of free speech domains. This Article examines the nature and reach of this particular brand of First Amendment exceptionalism.

In Part I the author reviews First Amendment jurisprudence where the Supreme Court evinces, either explicitly or implicitly, some aversion to paternalism. This review covers several free speech frontiers, including commercial speech, …

Restraint And Responsibility: Judicial Review Of Campaign Reform, Spencer A. Overton

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

The First Amendment doctrine governing campaign finance law allows judicial outcomes to turn on often unstated political assumptions about the appropriate role of money in campaigns. As illustrated by the conflicting opinions of different U.S. Supreme Court Justices in McConnell v. FEC, current narrow tailoring and substantial overbreadth tests provide inadequate guidance and compel judges to rely on their own political assumptions in balancing the need for regulation against the right of free speech. Judges skeptical of campaign reform err on the side of protecting speech, while judges supportive of reform lean toward tolerating regulations said to prevent corruption. To …

Institutional Academic Freedom - A Constitutional Misconception: Did Grutter V. Bollinger Perpetuate The Confusion?, Richard H. Hiers

UF Law Faculty Publications

This article begins with a review of language that eventually gave rise to the concept of institutional academic freedom, and includes a summary of lower court decisions embracing that concept or notion. The second part identifies certain constitutional problems in connection with the idea that institutional academic freedom can somehow be derived from or based upon the First Amendment. The third part describes and analyzes language in the Court's Grutter decision, language that may or may not have the effect of validating the concept of institutional academic freedom under the First Amendment.

Protecting The Lady From Toledo: Post-Usa Patriot Act Electronic Surveillance At The Library, Susan Nevelow Mart

Publications

Library patrons are worried about the government looking over their shoulder while they read and surf the Internet. Because of the broad provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act, the lack of judicial and legislative oversight, the potential for content overcollection, and the ease with which applications for pen register, section 215 orders, or national security letters can be obtained, these fears cannot be dismissed.

Not For Attribution: Government's Interest In Protecting The Integrity Of Its Own Expression, Helen Norton

Publications

Public entities increasingly maintain that the First Amendment permits them to ensure that private speakers' views are not mistakenly attributed to the government. Consider, for example, Virginia's efforts to ban the Sons of Confederate Veterans' display of the Confederate flag logo on state-sponsored specialty license plates. Seeking to remain neutral in the ongoing debate over whether the Confederate flag is a symbol of "hate" or "heritage," Virginia argued that the state would be wrongly perceived as endorsing the flag if the logo appeared on a state-issued plate adorned by the identifier "VIRGINIA." The Fourth Circuit was unpersuaded, holding that the …

Copyright Under Siege: The First Amendment Front, Lackland H. Bloom Jr.

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Over the past decade, the law of copyright - traditionally an arcane and obscure specialty - has evolved into an extraordinarily controversial legal arena. To a significant extent, though not exclusively, this has been caused by the emerging clashes between copyright on the one hand and digital technology and the internet on the other. Some see copyright as the aggressor in the copyright wars, guilty of threatening the digital revolution, the internet, information policy, privacy, freedom of speech and the public domain. Much of this assault on copyright is culturally driven by the Internet's champions. Inevitably, this cultural challenge is …

The First Amendment, The Public-Private Distinction, And Nongovernmental Suppression Of Wartime Political Debate, Gregory P. Magarian

Scholarship@WashULaw

This article proposes a major expansion in the scope of First Amendment law and offers a fresh way of understanding the public-private distinction. It contends that the Supreme Court should invoke the First Amendment to enjoin nongovernmental behavior that substantially impedes public political debate during times of war and national emergency. As the article explains, the present campaign against international terrorism has seen employers, property owners, and media corporations restrict political discussion more frequently and aggressively than the government has. If political debate is the most important object of First Amendment protection - which the article contends it is - …

More Is Less, Philip A. Hamburger

Faculty Scholarship

Is the First Amendment's right of free exercise of religion conditional upon government interests? Many eighteenth-century Americans said it was utterly unconditional. For example, James Madison and numerous contemporaries declared in 1785 that "the right of every man to exercise ['Religion'] ... is in its nature an unalienable right" and "therefore that in matters of Religion, no mans right is abridged by the institution of Civil Society." In contrast, during the past forty years, the United States Supreme Court has repeatedly conditioned the right of free exercise on compelling government interests. The Court not merely qualifies the practice of the …

Copy This Essay: How Fair Use Doctrine Harms Free Speech And How Copying Serves It, Rebecca Tushnet

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Defenders of transformative uses have invoked the First Amendment to bolster claims that such uses should not be subject to the copyright owner’s permission. But this focus on transformation is critically incomplete, leaving unchallenged much of copyright’s scope, despite the large number of nontransformative copying activities that are also instances of free speech. The current debate leaves the way open for expansions of copyright that, while not targeted at dissenting viewpoints, nonetheless may have a profoundly negative effect on freedom of speech. In other words, transformation has limited our thinking about the free speech interests implicated by copying. This essay …

"Doublethink"Ing Privacy Under The Multi-State Antiterrorism Information Exchange, Thomas V. Burch

Scholarly Works

This Article examines the development of the Matrix program and analyzes its effect on what Justices Warren and Brandeis termed the individual's "right to be let alone." To understand the Matrix's effect on individual privacy, one must scrutinize the program in the context of United States history.From the Alien and Sedition Acts to the Red Squads of the 1960s and 1970.

Part II of this Article examines how civil liberties often suffer unnecessarily in times of national crisis. Part III then discusses how this truism applies in the current "war on terror" and details the development and operation of the …

Defining Democracy: The Supreme Court's Campaign Finance Dilemma, Lori A. Ringhand

Scholarly Works

On December 10, 2003 the United States Supreme Court issued its decision in McConnell v. FEC. In McConnell, the Court was asked to determine the constitutionality of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act ("BCRA"). A divided Court, in a deeply fractured decision in which six justices wrote individual opinions, upheld the major provisions of the legislation. Yet despite the almost 300 pages of reasoning provided by the Court, and a voluminous record developed by the district court, the Justices could not agree on what purportedly is the central issue in campaign finance law: whether the challenged regulations were necessary …