Law Commons^™

Government Lies And The Press Clause, Helen Norton

Publications

This essay considers a particular universe of potentially dangerous governmental falsehoods: the government's lies and misrepresentations about and to the press.

Government's efforts to regulate private speakers' lies clearly implicate the First Amendment, as many (but not all) of our own lies are protected by the Free Speech Clause. But because the government does not have First Amendment rights of its own when it speaks, the constitutional limits, if any, on the government's own lies are considerably less clear.

In earlier work I have explored in some detail the Free Speech and Due Process Clauses as possible constraints on certain …

Public Employee Speech, Categorical Balancing And § 1983: A Critique Of Garcetti V. Ceballos, Sheldon H. Nahmod

University of Richmond Law Review

I propose to discuss Garcetti's First Amendment reasoning as well as the implications of the § 1983' setting in which Garcetti and other public employee free speech cases typically arise. After briefly setting out the Court's opinion and the three dissenting opinions, I begin by addressing the pros and cons of Garcetti, and in the course of so doing, I discuss the prior Pickering-Connick landscape that Garcetti so significantly altered. I consider the deeper First Amendment implications of Garcetti, including itsuse of categorical balancing to create an absolute immunity fromFirst Amendment liability for employer discipline based on job-required public employee …

Government Of The Good, Abner S. Greene

Vanderbilt Law Review

Government "speaks" both directly through its own pronouncements and indirectly through funding private speech. Many scholars of both political theory and constitutional law have argued that government should not use its persuasive powers to promote contested notions of the good life. Whether the issue is providing information about childbirth without also providing information about abortion or insisting on adherence to decency standards when awarding cultural grants, scholars generally have maintained that government should avoid taking sides.

In this Article, Professor Greene supports the contrary position, advocating a vigorous role for government speech even in areas of great social contest. Government …