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Full-Text Articles in Law
Contextualizing Disclosure's Effects: Wikileaks, Balancing And The First Amendment, Christina E. Wells
Contextualizing Disclosure's Effects: Wikileaks, Balancing And The First Amendment, Christina E. Wells
Faculty Publications
This essay responds to Professor Fenster’s article in the Iowa Law Review, Disclosure’s Effects: WikiLeaks and Transparency, assessing the effects of the recent WikiLeaks disclosures. The essay agrees with many of Professor Fenster’s conclusions regarding the promise and peril of those disclosures, especially his concern regarding the problematic balancing approaches used to assess the likely impact when confidential information is revealed. It specifically elaborates on courts’ current application of the Espionage Act, a criminal law likely to be applied to the WikiLeaks disclosures, and the implications of that deferential application for WikiLeaks, Julian Assange and journalists in general.
Authorship, Audiences, And Anonymous Speech, Thomas F. Cotter, Lyrissa Lidsky
Authorship, Audiences, And Anonymous Speech, Thomas F. Cotter, Lyrissa Lidsky
Faculty Publications
A series of United States Supreme Court decisions establishes that the First Amendment provides a qualified right to speak and publish anonymously, or under a pseudonym. But the Court has never clearly defined the scope of this right. As a result, lower courts have been left with little guidance when it comes to dealing both with the Internet-fueled growth of torts and crimes committed by anonymous speakers, and with the increasing number of lawsuits aimed at silencing legitimate anonymous speech. In this Article, we provide both positive and normative foundations for a comprehensive approach to anonymous speech. We first draw …
Hate Speech In The Constitutional Law Of The United States, William B. Fisch
Hate Speech In The Constitutional Law Of The United States, William B. Fisch
Faculty Publications
Our general reporter, Professor Pizzorusso, has given us “incitement to hatred” - primarily against a group of persons defined in terms of race, ethnicity, national origin, gender, religion, sexual orientation, and the like--as the working definition of “hate speech”, and asks to what extent such speech is constitutionally protected in the reporting countries. The United States of America are known at least in recent times for providing exceptionally broad protection for otherwise objectionable speech and expression, and hate speech is understood to be one of the areas in which they have positioned themselves further out on the speech-protective end of …
Silencing John Doe: Defamation And Discourse In Cyberspace, Lyrissa Lidsky
Silencing John Doe: Defamation And Discourse In Cyberspace, Lyrissa Lidsky
Faculty Publications
John Doe has become a popular defamation defendant as corporations and their officers bring defamation suits for statements made about them in Internet discussion fora. These new suits are not even arguably about recovering money damages but instead are brought for symbolic reasons — some worthy, some not so worthy. If the only consequence of these suits were that Internet users were held accountable for their speech, the suits would be an unalloyed good. However, these suits threaten to suppress legitimate criticism along with intentional and reckless falsehoods, and existing First Amendment law doctrines are not responsive to the threat …