Law Commons^™

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 …

Education Is Speech: Parental Free Speech In Education, Philip A. Hamburger

Faculty Scholarship

Education is speech. This simple point is profoundly important. Yet it rarely gets attention in the First Amendment and education scholarship.

Among the implications are those for public schools. All the states require parents to educate their minor children and at the same time offer parents educational support in the form of state schooling. States thereby press parents to take government educational speech in place of their own. Under both the federal and state speech guarantees, states cannot pressure parents, either directly or through conditions, to give up their own educational speech, let alone substitute state educational speech. This abridges …

The Classic Arguments For Free Speech 1644-1927, Vincent A. Blasi

Faculty Scholarship

This chapter examines the classic arguments for freedom of speech. It traces the first comprehensive argument for freedom of speech as a limiting principle of government to John Milton’s Areopagitica, a polemic against censorship by a requirement of prior licensing in which Milton develops an argument for the pursuit of truth through exposure to false and heretical ideas rather than the passive reception of orthodoxy. Despite Milton’s belief in the advancement of understanding through free inquiry, he was far from liberal in the modern sense of that term and he did not, for instance, extend the tolerance he advocated to …

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.

Disinformation In The Marketplace Of Ideas, Tim Wu

Faculty Scholarship

It was just one line, nearly a throwaway; technically a subordinate clause. Yet that one clause from Oliver Wendell Holmes’s Abrams dissent breathed life into a metaphor, the “marketplace of ideas,” whose lasting power is undeniable. Nor is it difficult to understand why. Yes, it may be incomplete, inaccurate, and possibly cribbed from John Stuart Mill, but the metaphor matches something we all see. Ideas and ideological programs are out there looking for adherents or “buyers.” In Holmes’s time, progressives, socialists, and fascists courted supporters, just as similar groups do now. Specific ideas like the flat tax or the legalization …

Holmes's Understanding Of His Clear-And-Present-Danger Test: Why Exactly Did He Require Imminence?, Vincent A. Blasi

Faculty Scholarship

For all the suggestiveness and staying power of his market-in-ideas metaphor, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’s most significant influence on First Amendment law has turned out to be his notion that only imminent harm can justify punishment for expressions of opinion. This emphasis on the time dimension in the calculus of harm is now entrenched in modern doctrine. It is easy to imagine how First Amendment law might have developed differently had Holmes’s peculiar focus on imminence not been a factor in shaping how the freedom of speech has come to be understood in the United States.

Fixing America's Founding, Maeve Glass

Faculty Scholarship

The forty-fifth presidency of the United States has sent lawyers reaching once more for the Founders’ dictionaries and legal treatises. In courtrooms, law schools, and media outlets across the country, the original meanings of the words etched into the U.S. Constitution in 1787 have become the staging ground for debates ranging from the power of a president to trademark his name in China to the rights of a legal permanent resident facing deportation. And yet, in this age when big data promises to solve potential challenges of interpretation and judges have for the most part agreed that original meaning should …

Antitrust & Corruption: Overruling Noerr, Tim Wu

Faculty Scholarship

We live in a time when concerns about influence over the American political process by powerful private interests have reached an apogee, both on the left and the right. Among the laws originally intended to fight excessive private influence over republican institutions were the antitrust laws, whose sponsors were concerned not just with monopoly, but also its influence over legislatures and politicians. While no one would claim that the antitrust laws were meant to be comprehensive anti-corruption laws, there can be little question that they were passed with concerns about the political influence of powerful firms and industry cartels.

Since …

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 …

Janus's Two Faces, Kate Andrias

Faculty Scholarship

In ancient Roman religion and myth, Janus is the god of beginnings, transitions, and endings. He is often depicted as having two faces, one looking to the future and one to the past. The Supreme Court’s Janus v AFSCME case of last Term is fittingly named.Stunning in its disregard of principles of stare decisis, Janus overruled the forty-year-old precedent Abood v Detroit Board of Education.The Janus decision marks the end of the post – New Deal compromise with respect to public sector unions and the First Amendment. Looking to the future, Janus lays the groundwork for further attack on …

Constitutional Moral Hazard And Campus Speech, Jamal Greene

Faculty Scholarship

One underappreciated cost of constitutional rights enforcement is moral hazard. In economics, moral hazard refers to the increased propensity of insured individuals to engage in costly behavior. This Essay concerns what I call “constitutional moral hazard,” defined as the use of constitutional rights (or their conspicuous absence) to shield potentially destructive behavior from moral or pragmatic assessment. What I have in mind here is not simply the risk that people will make poor decisions when they have a right to do so, but that people may, at times, make poor decisions because they have a right. Moral hazard is not …

A Skeptical View Of Information Fiduciaries, Lina M. Khan, David E. Pozen

Faculty Scholarship

The concept of “information fiduciaries” has surged to the forefront of debates on online-platform regulation. Developed by Professor Jack Balkin, the concept is meant to rebalance the relationship between ordinary individuals and the digital companies that accumulate, analyze, and sell their personal data for profit. Just as the law imposes special duties of care, confidentiality, and loyalty on doctors, lawyers, and accountants vis-à-vis their patients and clients, Balkin argues, so too should it impose special duties on corporations such as Facebook, Google, and Twitter vis-à-vis their end users. Over the past several years, this argument has garnered remarkably broad support …

Seeing Transparency More Clearly, David E. Pozen

Faculty Scholarship

In recent years, transparency has been proposed as the solution to, and the cause of, a remarkable range of public problems. The proliferation of seemingly contradictory claims about transparency becomes less puzzling, this essay argues, when one appreciates that transparency is not, in itself, a coherent normative ideal. Nor does it have a straightforward instrumental relationship to any primary goals of governance. To gain greater purchase on how transparency policies operate, scholars must therefore move beyond abstract assumptions and drill down into the specific legal, institutional, historical, political, and cultural contexts in which these policies are crafted and implemented. The …

Is The First Amendment Obsolete?, Tim Wu

Faculty Scholarship

The First Amendment was brought to life in a period, the twentieth century, when the political speech environment was markedly different than today’s. With respect to any given issue, speech was scarce and limited to a few newspapers, pamphlets or magazines. The law was embedded, therefore, with the presumption that the greatest threat to free speech was direct punishment of speakers by government.

Today, in the internet and social media age, it is no longer speech that is scarce – rather, it is the attention of listeners. And those who seek to control speech use new methods that rely on …

Beyond The Bosses' Constitution: The First Amendment And Class Entrenchment, Jedediah S. Purdy

Faculty Scholarship

The Supreme Court’s “weaponized” First Amendment has been its strongest antiregulatory tool in recent decades, slashing campaign-finance regulation, public-sector union financing, and pharmaceutical regulation, and threatening a broader remit. Along with others, I have previously criticized these developments as a “new Lochnerism.” In this Essay, part of a Columbia Law Review Symposium, I press beyond these criticisms to diagnose the ideological outlook of these opinions and to propose an alternative. The leading decisions of the antiregulatory First Amendment often associate free speech with a vision of market efficiency; but, I argue, closer to their heart is antistatist fear of entrenchment …

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 …

Hate Speech At Home And Abroad, Sarah H. Cleveland

Faculty Scholarship

The United States’ best-known constitutional protection internationally is surely the First Amendment. Around the world, the United States is perceived as protecting freedom of expression and the press first and foremost, among all rights. And whether admired for its purity and idealism or dismissed as naïve and sui generis, the United States’ approach to free speech is globally examined, critiqued, and debated. It is the United States’ most prominent constitutional export, informing the drafting of foreign constitutions, statutes, and judicial interpretations, and undergirding the protection for freedom of expression in the international and regional human rights systems.

This chapter …

A Reader’S Guide To John Milton’S Areopagitica, The Foundational Essay Of The First Amendment Tradition, Vincent A. Blasi

Faculty Scholarship

Fittingly, the most imaginative and densely suggestive of the classic arguments for free speech was written by a poet. Had his career unfolded as he wished, John Milton would never have produced his renowned Areopagitica of 1644. It was only with great reluctance that he undertook to engage in prose polemics during the English Civil War, sacrificing his “calm and pleasing solitariness” to “embark in a troubled sea of noises and hoarse disputes.” He described pamphleteering as something he did “with the left hand” all the while “knowing myself inferior to myself.” Posterity, always a Miltonic concern, has begged to …

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 …

The Supreme Court, Judicial Elections, And Dark Money, Richard Briffault

Faculty Scholarship

Judges, even when popularly elected, are not representatives; they are not agents for their voters, nor should they take voter preferences into account in adjudicating cases. However, popularly elected judges are representatives for some election law purposes. Unlike other elected officials, judges are not politicians. But judges are policy-makers. Judicial elections are subject to the same constitutional doctrines that govern voting on legislators, executives, and ballot propositions. Except when they are not. The same First Amendment doctrine that protects campaign speech in legislative, executive, and ballot proposition elections applies to campaign speech in judicial elections – but not in quite …

Free Expression On Campus: Mitigating The Costs Of Contentious Speakers, Suzanne B. Goldberg

Faculty Scholarship

“If you’re afraid to offend, you can’t be honest.”

“If you offend me, I can’t hear what you’re trying to tell me.”

—overheard on campus

The debate over how colleges and universities should respond to contentious guest speakers on campus is not a new one. A quick look back to the early 1990s, among other times, shows commentators squaring off much as they do today about the tensions between protecting free expression and ensuring meaningful equality.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the issues that contested speakers address are also much the same as they have been for several decades – government action …

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 …

Transparency's Ideological Drift, David E. Pozen

Faculty Scholarship

In the formative periods of American "open government" law, the idea of transparency was linked with progressive politics. Advocates of transparency understood themselves to be promoting values such as bureaucratic rationality, social justice, and trust in public institutions. Transparency was meant to make government stronger and more egalitarian. In the twenty-first century, transparency is doing different work. Although a wide range of actors appeal to transparency in a wide range of contexts, the dominant strain in the policy discourse emphasizes its capacity to check administrative abuse, enhance private choice, and reduce other forms of regulation. Transparency is meant to make …

Hate Speech, Public Assurance, And The Civic Standing Of Speakers And Victims, Vincent A. Blasi

Faculty Scholarship

Jeremy Waldron and James Weinstein have opened up a promising line of inquiry regarding the legitimacy and propriety of hate speech regulation. In doing so, they have succeeded in reinvigorating a subject that had grown academically formulaic even while becoming alarmingly more salient politically and culturally. Together they have enriched our understanding with their specificity of argumentation, intellectual courage, fairminded attentiveness to critics and counter-arguments, comparative law perspective, and genuine originality of conception. I find that each has shown me at least one significant problem in the other’s analysis, a symmetry that I consider a tribute to both.

The Early Years Of First Amendment Lochnerism, Jeremy K. Kessler

Faculty Scholarship

From Citizens United to Hobby Lobby, civil libertarian challenges to the regulation of economic activity are increasingly prevalent. Critics of this trend invoke the specter of Lochner v. New York. They suggest that the First Amendment, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and other legislative "conscience clauses" are being used to resurrect the economically libertarian substantive due process jurisprudence of the early twentieth century. Yet the worry that aggressive judicial enforcement of the First Amendment might erode democratic regulation of the economy and enhance the economic power of private actors has a long history. As this Article demonstrates, anxieties …

Supreme Court Amicus Brief Of 19 Corporate Law Professors, Friedrichs V. California Teachers Association, No. 14-915, John C. Coates, Iv, Lucian A. Bebchuk, Bernard S. Black, John C. Coffee Jr., James D. Cox, Ronald J. Gilson, Jeffrey N. Gordon, Lawrence A. Hamermesh, Henry Hansmann, Robert J. Jackson Jr., Marcel Kahan, Vikramaditya S. Khanna, Michael Klausner, Reinier Kraakman, Donald C. Langevoort, Edward B. Rock, Mark J. Roe, Helen S. Scott

Faculty Scholarship

The Supreme Court has looked to the rights of corporate shareholders in determining the rights of union members and non-members to control political spending, and vice versa. The Court sometimes assumes that if shareholders disapprove of corporate political expression, they can easily sell their shares or exercise control over corporate spending. This assumption is mistaken. Because of how capital is saved and invested, most individual shareholders cannot obtain full information about corporate political activities, even after the fact, nor can they prevent their savings from being used to speak in ways with which they disagree. Individual shareholders have no “opt …

Irb Licensing, Philip A. Hamburger

Faculty Scholarship

This chapter examines conflicting norms in the government's licensing of speech and the press on “human-subjects research” through institutional review boards (IRBs). It begins by discussing licensing and why the prohibition of it is so fundamental and prroceeds by providing an overview of the structure of institutional review board licensing. It then highlights the unconstitutionality of IRB laws, arguing that the use of IRBs violates the principles of academic freedom. It asserts that licensing of speech or the press was a method of controlling the press employed by the Inquisition and the Star Chamber, and the First Amendment unequivocally barred …

Uncivil Obedience, Jessica Bulman-Pozen, David E. Pozen

Faculty Scholarship

Scholars and activists have long been interested in conscientious law-breaking as a means of dissent. The civil disobedient violates the law in a bid to highlight its illegitimacy and motivate reform. A less heralded form of social action, however, involves nearly the opposite approach. As a wide range of examples attest, dissenters may also seek to disrupt legal regimes through hyperbolic, literalistic, or otherwise unanticipated adherence to their formal rules.

This Article asks how to make sense of these more paradoxical protests, involving not explicit law-breaking but rather extreme law following. We seek to identify, elucidate, and call attention to …

That We Are Underlings: The Real Problems In Disciplining Political Spending And The First Amendment, Jedediah S. Purdy

Faculty Scholarship

We’re gathered at the intersection of professional reason and popular passion. The roughly two-thirds of Americans who have said they strongly oppose Citizens United don’t have a theory of the First Amendment; they have a felt sense that the decision is an emblem of the political condition that unites Tea Partiers, Occupiers, and the Warren wing of the Democratic Party in shared disgust: the superior political influence and access of big business and great fortunes. This is the condition, or a subset of the condition, that Larry Lessig and Zephyr Teachout call corruption rightly understood: structural corruption that tethers the …

Market Structure And Political Law: A Taxonomy Of Power, Zephyr Teachout, Lina M. Khan

Faculty Scholarship

The goal of this Article is to create a way of seeing how market structure is innately political. It provides a taxonomy of ways in which large companies frequently exercise powers that possess the character of governance. Broadly, these exercises of power map onto three bodies of activity we generally assign to government: to set policy, to regulate markets, and to tax. We add a fourth category – which we call "dominance," after Brandeis – as a kind of catchall describing the other political impacts. The activities we outline will not always fit neatly into these categories, nor do all …