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Untold Stories Of Goldman V. Weinberger: Religious Freedom Confronts Military Uniformity, Samuel J. Levine

Samuel J. Levine

In 1986, the United States Supreme Court handed down a 5-4 decision ruling that Air Force regulations prohibiting Simcha Goldman from wearing a yarmulke while in uniform did not violate Goldman’s First Amendment right to the free exercise of religion. The Court’s majority opinion, which accepted the government’s assertion that allowing Goldman to wear a yarmulke would unduly upset important military interests, drew unusually harsh responses from both dissenting justices and legal scholars. Yet, upon closer examination, perhaps what stands out most about the events surrounding the Goldman decision is the untold story of the case, which differs in significant …

Civility In Government Meetings: Balancing First Amendment, Reputational Interests, And Efficiency, Terri R. Day, Erin Bradford

Terri R. Day

This article addresses the issue of civility in local government meetings and the constitutional considerations for adopting rules of decorum. While not constitutionally guaranteed, the right of citizens to participate in public meetings can be created by state statute or judicial fiat. Once created, any restrictions placed on citizen speech are subject to constitutional dictates. Matters of local government business inflame passions; and public comment sessions can become explosive. When disruption occurs, presiding officials must act to silence citizens’ voices or eject them from public meetings, in ways that do not trample on First Amendment rights. In creating parameters that …

Civility In Government Meetings: Balancing First Amendment, Reputations Intests, And Efficiency, Terri R. Day, Erin Bradford

Terri R. Day

This article addresses the issue of civility in local government meetings and the constitutional considerations for adopting rules of decorum. While not constitutionally guaranteed, the right of citizens to participate in public meetings can be created by state statute or judicial fiat. Once created, any restrictions placed on citizen speech are subject to constitutional dictates. Matters of local government business inflame passions; and public comment sessions can become explosive. When disruption occurs, presiding officials must act to silence citizens’ voices or eject them from public meetings, in ways that do not trample on First Amendment rights. In creating parameters that …

Wikileaks Would Not Qualify To Claim Federal Reporter’S Privilege In Any Form, Jonathan Peters

Jonathan Peters

This article addresses whether WikiLeaks could claim a federal reporter’s privilege if the U.S. government or a U.S. entity tried to compel one of the site’s staff members to disclose the source(s) of any documents it has released. After exploring the origins of the First Amendment-based privilege, I argue that WikiLeaks would not be able to claim it. First, the website does not engage in investigative reporting. Second, it has not taken steps consistently to minimize harm. I also discuss congressional attempts to pass a federal shield law, paying special attention to H.R. 985 and S. 448, the two most …

Religious Truth, Pluralism, And Secularization: The Shaking Foundations Of American Religious Liberty, Daniel O. Conkle

Articles by Maurer Faculty

In this Essay, I recount John Locke’s 1689 Letter Concerning Toleration and explain how religious liberty continues to rest on Lockean and related justifications. These various justifications depend in part on religious-moral reasoning (both Christian and non-Christian) and in part on political-pragmatic considerations. I then discuss recent and ongoing developments in the American religious landscape, including a radical increase in religious diversity, the modernization of traditional faiths, the individualization or "spiritualization" of religion, and the increasing secularization of individual belief structures. I suggest that these developments, over time, may seriously threaten the underlying religious-moral and political-pragmatic foundations of religious liberty …

The Supreme Court Rules In Favor Of Religious Club’S Right To Meet On Public School Premises: Is This “Good News” For First Amendment Rights?, Thomas A. Schweitzer

Thomas A. Schweitzer

No abstract provided.

Bruce Ledewitz, American Religious Democracy: Coming To Terms With The End Of Secular Politics, Thomas A. Schweitzer

Thomas A. Schweitzer

No abstract provided.

The Progeny Of Lee V. Weisman: Can Student-Invited Prayer At Public School Graduation Still Be Constitutional?, Thomas A. Schweitzer

Thomas A. Schweitzer

No abstract provided.

Wikileaks, The First Amendment, And The Press, Jonathan Peters

Jonathan Peters

This article focuses on one question: When can the government, consonant with the First Amendment, punish the publication of classified information related to national security? To that end, Part I outlines the constitutional standards that could apply to such a prosecution of WikiLeaks. Part II discusses whether WikiLeaks is part of the press and whether that matters for constitutional purposes. Part III concludes by urging the Justice Department to consider carefully whether it should prosecute WikiLeaks.

Just Shoot Me: Public Accommodation Anti-Discrimination Laws Take Aim At First Amendment Freedom Of Speech, James M. Gottry

Vanderbilt Law Review

Imagine a young woman, Elaine, who is a gifted photographer. She launches a small photography business with her husband, and soon she is in demand throughout the state. Her specialty is weddings. One day Elaine receives a request to photograph a same-sex commitment ceremony. Politely, she declines, explaining that she only photographs traditional weddings. Several months later, she is contacted by the state's Human Rights Commission. Elaine learns that a complaint has been filed against her, and she is being charged with discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.

Imagine a young man, Michael, who is a gifted filmmaker. While …

Awakening The Press Clause, Sonja R. West

Scholarly Works

The Free Press Clause enjoys less practical significance than almost any other constitutional provision. While recognizing the structural and expressive importance of a free press, the Supreme Court has never recognized explicitly any right or protection as emanating solely from the Press Clause. Recently in the Court’s Citizens United decision, Justices Stevens and Scalia reignited the 30-year-old debate over whether the Press Clause has any function separate from the Speech Clause.

The primary roadblock to recognizing independent meaning in the Press Clause is the definitional problem - who or what is the “press”? Others have attempted to define the press, …

Not All Threats Are Equal, Jeanne L. Surface

Educational Leadership Faculty Publications

School leaders must be fully prepared to respond to all types of threats that occur. In order to respond to threats most appropriately the school needs to have a systematic approach that combines education, prevention, intervention, discipline, security and crisis preparedness measures. All threats must be assessed carefully and swiftly balancing the First Amendment rights of the student making the threat and the safety of the school. All threats are not equal but, all must be dealt with.

From Four Part Tests To First Principles: Putting Free Speech Jurisprudence Into Perspective, Joshua D. Rosenberg, Joshua P. Davis

Joshua D. Rosenberg

Abstract

Those familiar with free speech jurisprudence know it as a complicated, contradictory, and incoherent agglomeration of hyper-technical three and four part tests. In this article, the authors look back at how each of these different doctrines and tests developed, the purposes it properly serves, and how it became unanchored from those purposes. We show that at bottom the Court approaches freedom of speech much as it does other constitutional rights. The ultimate issues it seeks to resolve are: (1) to what extent does government have a duty to avoid interfering with a speaker? (2) if government has a duty …

Property Rights To Information, Jamie Lund

Jamie Lund

Laws against defamation regulate information sharing by correcting misstatements of fact in order to protect reputations. One benefit of enforcement of defamation laws is the reduction of information pollution. Misinformation increases search costs and thereby reducing efficiency in the procurement of accurate information. First Amendment protection over false speech has expanded over the last half century, decreasing the occurrence of defamation suits, leaving the information field wide open for information pollution undeterred by defamation suits. The market for information has changed dramatically with the popularization of the Internet, the exponential growth of speakers in the past decade, and the corresponding …

First Amendment Architecture, Marvin Ammori

Marvin Ammori

The right to free speech is meaningless without some place to exercise it. But constitutional scholarship generally overlooks the role of judicial doctrines in ensuring the availability of spaces for speech. Indeed, when scholarship addresses doctrines that are explicitly concerned with speech spaces such as public forums and media or Internet forums, it generally marginalizes these doctrines as “exceptions” to standard First Amendment analysis. By overlooking or marginalizing these decisions, scholarship has failed to explicate the logic underlying important doctrinal areas and what these areas reveal about the First Amendment’s normative underpinnings.

This Article adopts a different interpretive approach. It …

Hostile Educational Environments: On The Apparent First Amendment Barrier To Cyberbullying Punishments, Ari E. Waldman

Ari E Waldman

This Article is one in a series about bullying and cyberbullying in schools. I argue that the proper analysis for a First Amendment challenge to school discipline for off-campus misuse of the Internet to harm or offend a member of the school community depends on the nature of the offending behavior. For students who are punished for a single incident – what I will call cyberattacking – a Tinker analysis makes sense. Except in extraordinary circumstances, the First Amendment should immunize these single-incident attackers from punishment. For students who engage in a pattern of repeated incidents of cyberattacking – what …

Public Forum 2.0, Lyrissa Lidsky

Lyrissa Barnett Lidsky

Social media have the potential to revolutionize discourse between American citizens and their governments. At present, however, the U.S. Supreme Court's public forum jurisprudence frustrates rather than fosters that potential. This article navigates the notoriously complex body of public forum doctrine to provide guidance for those who must develop or administer government-sponsored social media, or adjudicate First Amendment questions concerning them. Next, the article marks out a new path for public forum doctrine that will allow it to realize the potential of Web 2.0 technologies to enhance democratic discourse between the governors and the governed. Along the way, this article …

Copyright And The Vagueness Doctrine, Bradley E. Abruzzi

Bradley E Abruzzi

The Constitution’s void-for-vagueness doctrine is itself vaguely stated. The law does little to describe at what point vague laws — other than those that are entirely standardless — might be unconstitutionally vague. Rather than explore this territory, the Supreme Court has identified three “collateral factors” that affect its inclination to invalidate a law for vagueness, including (1) whether the law burdens the exercise of constitutional rights, (2) whether the law is punitive in nature, and (3) whether the law overlays a defendant-protective scienter requirement. Against this backdrop, it is fair to say that copyright law, in its current configuration, does …

Justice Stevens, Religion, And Civil Society, Gregory P. Magarian

Gregory P. Magarian

Did Justice John Paul Stevens, who retired from the Supreme Court last year, harbor a bias against religion? During his 35 years on the Court, Justice Stevens showed little favor for religious claimants. In Establishment Clause cases he advocated a strong doctrine of separation between church and state. In the most contentious Free Exercise Clause cases, he flatly opposed exempting religious believers from laws that interfered with their religious exercise. This combination of positions, unique among the Justices of the Burger, Rehnquist, and Roberts Courts, has led commentators to charge Justice Stevens with disdain for religion. In this article, Professor …

Mill, Holmes, Brandeis, And A True Threat To Brandenburg, Mark Strasser

Mark Strasser

John Stuart Mill argues for robust protection of free speech, and some of the essential elements of that position reflect the protections advocated by Justices Holmes and Brandeis that were eventually incorporated in Brandenburg. However, Brandenburg protections have not been analyzed in light of the developing true threats jurisprudence, most recently described and employed in Virginia v. Black. After analyzing the positions of Mill, Holmes, and Brandeis and discussing true threats jurisprudence, this article concludes that unless the Court explains how to differentiate between advocacy and true threats and, further, identifies the extent to which the Constitution protects advocacy that …

Ten Years After: Bartnicki V. Vopper As A Laboratory For First Amendment Advocacy And Analysis, Eric B. Easton

Eric B Easton

Ten Years After: Bartnicki v. Vopper as a Laboratory for First Amendment Advocacy and Analysis is a retrospective article that focuses on the litigation process involved in that case and the differences among the district, circuit, and high court opinions. The district court case was a battle of controlling precedents, the circuit court case selected among established doctrinal choices, and the Supreme Court decision came down to a delicate balancing test between the values at issue. Beyond analyzing the decisions, the article also explores the influence of the principal players in the litigation: the excellent regional media lawyer who took …

"Put Colloquially, American Law Believes That Talking Out Prevents Acting Out." A First Amendment Primer, David D. Butler

David D. Butler

"Put Colloquially, American Law Believes that Talking Out Prevents Acting Out:" A Free Speech Primer argues that the Federal First Amendment, textually against Congress,and as incorporated by reference against the Several States, states a preference for (1) sanctioning harmful speech or expression in civil proceedings (2) rather than penalizing the speaker or actor in criminal prosecutions. The essay argues that whether in the 1988 theft of an unflattering painting of Chicago Mayor Harold Washington, titled "Mirth and Girth," by three Chicago aldermen from the Chicago Art Institute ranging to then president Clinton's perjury regarding his earlier sexual abuse of an …

The Skinny On The Federal Menu-Labeling Law & Why It Should Survive A First Amendment Challenge, Dayna B. Royal

Dayna B. Royal

In America’s battle of the bulge, the bulge is winning. Contributing to this obesity epidemic is Americans’ increasingly widespread practice of eating at restaurants where deceptively fattening food is served to patrons who grossly underestimate the calories in their meals.

To combat this problem and promote public health, Congress enacted a federal menu-labeling law, which requires that restaurants post calorie information next to menu offerings. The constitutionality of this law has yet to be tested in court. But New York City’s law, enacted prior, has survived First Amendment scrutiny.

Like New York’s menu-labeling law, the federal law should withstand a …

The First Amendment And The Common Law Constitution, Chris Stangl

Chris Stangl

No abstract provided.

Book Review: The Free Press Crisis Of 1800: Thomas Cooper's Trial For Seditious Libel, Eric Easton

All Faculty Scholarship

This article was an invited book review of a book of the same title by Peter Charles Hoffer. Hoffer, Distinguished Research Professor of History at the University of Georgia, has published this accessible case history as part of the University Press of Kansas’s Landmark Law Cases & American Society series, which he co-edits.

The book discusses one of the cases arising as a result of the Alien & Sedition Act under the presidency of John Adams, mostly targeting Republicans who editorialized against the Adams administration.

Ten Years After: Bartnicki V. Vopper As Laboratory For First Amendment Advocacy And Analysis, Eric Easton

All Faculty Scholarship

How many ways can one approach a First Amendment analysis? What influences a lawyer or a judge to select one analytical approach over another? And what is the long-term effect of a court's choice of one over another? In Bartnicki v. Vopper, a 2001 case in which the U.S. Supreme Court considered federal and state statutes prohibiting the disclosure of illegally intercepted telephone conversations, we are privileged to have a small laboratory through which to study the first two questions. And, from the vantage point of ten years, we ought to be able to make some informed predictions as to …

Advising Terrorism: Material Support, Safe Harbors, And Freedom Of Speech, Peter Margulies

Law Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Dark Side Of The Force: The Legacy Of Justice Holmes For First Amendment Jurisprudence, Steven J. Heyman

All Faculty Scholarship

Modern First Amendment jurisprudence is deeply paradoxical. On one hand, freedom of speech is said to promote fundamental values such as individual self-fulfillment, democratic deliberation, and the search for truth. At the same time, however, many leading decisions protect speech that appears to undermine these values by attacking the dignity and personality of others or their status as full and equal members of the community. In this Article, I explore where this Jekyll-and-Hyde quality of First Amendment jurisprudence comes from. I argue that the American free speech tradition consists of two very different strands: a liberal humanist view that emphasizes …

Virtual Child Pornography Laws And The Constraints Imposed By The First Amendment, Paula Bird

Barry Law Review

This article seeks to navigate through the complexities involved with the uncertain future of virtual child pornography laws. First, this article sets forth a brief history of the legislative actions and court rulings regarding unprotected speech and virtual child pornography, and discusses the current standing of child pornography laws. Entailed in this discussion will be a vigorous inspection of the current statutes and how they simultaneously affect law enforcement, prosecutors, and defendants. Finally, the potential future of laws regarding virtual child pornography is analyzed, including addressing the issues of how the application and interpretation of the laws are changing and …

Incendiary Speech And Social Media, Lyrissa Lidsky

Faculty Publications

Incidents illustrating the incendiary capacity of social media have rekindled concerns about the "mismatch" between existing doctrinal categories and new types of dangerous speech. This Essay examines two such incidents, one in which an offensive tweet and YouTube video led a hostile audience to riot and murder, and the other in which a blogger urged his nameless, faceless audience to murder federal judges. One incident resulted in liability for the speaker even though no violence occurred; the other did not lead to liability for the speaker even though at least thirty people died as a result of his words. An …