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Full-Text Articles in Law
Powerful Speakers And Their Listeners, Helen Norton
Powerful Speakers And Their Listeners, Helen Norton
Articles
In certain settings, law sometimes puts listeners first when their First Amendment interests collide with speakers’. And collide they often do. Sometimes speakers prefer to tell lies when their listeners thirst for the truth. Sometimes listeners hope that speakers will reveal their secrets, while those speakers resist disclosure. And at still other times, speakers seek to address certain listeners when those listeners long to be left alone. When speakers’ and listeners’ First Amendment interests collide, whose interests should prevail? Law sometimes – but not always – puts listeners’ interests first in settings outside of public discourse where those listeners have less information ...
The First Queer Right, Scott Skinner-Thompson
The First Queer Right, Scott Skinner-Thompson
Articles
Current legal disputes may lead one to believe that the greatest threat to LGBTQ rights is the First Amendment’s protections for speech, association, and religion, which are currently being mustered to challenge LGBTQ anti-discrimination protections. But underappreciated today is the role of free speech and free association in advancing the well-being of LGBTQ individuals, as explained in Professor Carlos Ball’s important new book, The First Amendment and LGBT Equality: A Contentious History. In many ways the First Amendment’s protections for free expression and association operated as what I label “the first queer right.”
Decades before the Supreme ...
Robotic Speakers And Human Listeners, Helen Norton
Robotic Speakers And Human Listeners, Helen Norton
Articles
In their new book, Robotica, Ron Collins and David Skover assert that we protect speech not so much because of its value to speakers but instead because of its affirmative value to listeners. If we assume that the First Amendment is largely, if not entirely, about serving listeners’ interests—in other words, that it’s listeners all the way down—what would a listener-centered approach to robotic speech require? This short symposium essay briefly discusses the complicated and sometimes even dark side of robotic speech from a listener-centered perspective.
Government Lies And The Press Clause, Helen Norton
Government Lies And The Press Clause, Helen Norton
Articles
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 ...
(At Least) Thirteen Ways Of Looking At Election Lies, Helen Norton
(At Least) Thirteen Ways Of Looking At Election Lies, Helen Norton
Articles
Lies take many forms. Because lies vary so greatly in their motivations and consequences (among many other qualities), philosophers have long sought to catalog them to help make sense of their diversity and complexity. Legal scholars too have classified lies in various ways to explain why we punish some and protect others. This symposium essay offers yet another taxonomy of lies, focusing specifically on election lies — that is, lies told during or about elections. We can divide and describe election lies in a wide variety of ways: by speaker, by motive, by subject matter, by audience, by means of delivery ...
“And Yet It Moves”—The First Amendment And Certainty, Ronald K.L. Collins
“And Yet It Moves”—The First Amendment And Certainty, Ronald K.L. Collins
Articles
Surprisingly few, if any, works on the First Amendment have explored the relation between free speech and certainty. The same holds true for decisional law. While this relationship is inherent in much free speech theory and doctrine, its treatment has nonetheless been rather opaque. In what follows, the author teases out— philosophically, textually, and operationally—the significance of that relationship and what it means for our First Amendment jurisprudence. In the process, he examines how the First Amendment operates to counter claims of certainty and likewise how it is employed to demand a degree of certainty from those who wish ...
Government Speech And The War On Terror, Helen Norton
Government Speech And The War On Terror, Helen Norton
Articles
The government is unique among speakers because of its coercive power, its substantial resources, its privileged access to national security and intelligence information, and its wide variety of expressive roles as commander-in-chief, policymaker, educator, employer, property owner, and more. Precisely because of this power, variety, and ubiquity, the government's speech can both provide great value and inflict great harm to the public. In wartime, more specifically, the government can affirmatively choose to use its voice to inform, inspire, heal, and unite -- or instead to deceive, divide, bully, and silence.
In this essay, I examine the U.S. government's ...
Checking The Government’S Deception Through Public Employee Speech, Helen Norton
Checking The Government’S Deception Through Public Employee Speech, Helen Norton
Articles
No abstract provided.
Privacy And The Right To Record, Margot E. Kaminski
Privacy And The Right To Record, Margot E. Kaminski
Articles
Many U.S. laws protect privacy by governing recording. Recently, however, courts have recognized a First Amendment “right to record.” This Article addresses how courts should handle privacy laws in light of the developing First Amendment right to record.
The privacy harms addressed by recording laws are situated harms. Recording changes the way people behave in physical spaces by altering the nature of those spaces. Thus, recording laws can be placed within a long line of First Amendment case law that recognizes a valid government interest in managing the qualities of rivalrous physical space, so as not to allow one ...
Commentary: Exploiting Mixed Speech, Caroline Mala Corbin
Commentary: Exploiting Mixed Speech, Caroline Mala Corbin
Articles
The Supreme Court has been taking advantage of mixed speech—that is, speech that is both private and governmental—to characterize challenged speech in a way that ultimately permits the government to sponsor Christian speech. In Pleasant Grove City v. Summum, a free speech case where the government accepted a Christian Ten Commandments monument but rejected a Summum Seven Aphorisms monument, the Court held that privately donated monuments displayed in public parks were government speech as opposed to private speech and therefore not subject to free speech limits on viewpoint discrimination. In Town of Greece v. Galloway, an establishment case ...
Speech Or Conduct? The Free Speech Claims Of Wedding Vendors, Caroline Mala Corbin
Speech Or Conduct? The Free Speech Claims Of Wedding Vendors, Caroline Mala Corbin
Articles
No abstract provided.
Citizens United And The Corporate Form, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah
Citizens United And The Corporate Form, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah
Articles
In Citizens United vs. FEC, the Supreme Court struck down a Federal statute banning direct corporate expenditures on political campaigns. The decision has been widely criticized and praised as a matter of First Amendment law. But it is also interesting as another step in the evolution of our legal views of the corporation. This article argues that by viewing Citizens United through the prism of theories about the corporate form, it is possible to see that the majority and the dissent departed from previous Supreme Court jurisprudence on the First Amendment rights of corporations. It is also possible to then ...
Citizens United And The Corporate Form, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah
Citizens United And The Corporate Form, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah
Articles
In Citizens United vs. FEC, the Supreme Court struck down a Federal statute banning direct corporate expenditures on political campaigns. The decision has been widely criticized and praised as a matter of First Amendment law. But it is also interesting as another step in the evolution of our legal views of the corporation. This Article argues that by viewing Citizens Unitedthrough the prism of theories about the corporate form, it is possible to see that the majority and the dissent departed from previous Supreme Court jurisprudence on the First Amendment rights of corporations. It is also possible to then predict ...
Silence And The Word, Paul Campos
How To Do Things With The First Amendment, Pierre Schlag
How To Do Things With The First Amendment, Pierre Schlag
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No abstract provided.
Teaching Tolerance, Robert F. Nagel
Freedom Of Speech As Therapy, Pierre Schlag
How Useful Is Judicial Review In Free Speech Cases?, Robert F. Nagel
How Useful Is Judicial Review In Free Speech Cases?, Robert F. Nagel
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No abstract provided.
An Attack On Categorical Approaches To Freedom Of Speech, Pierre J. Schlag
An Attack On Categorical Approaches To Freedom Of Speech, Pierre J. Schlag
Articles
No abstract provided.
Unconstitutional Conditions Upon Public Employment: New Departures In The Protection Of First Amendment Rights, Harold H. Bruff
Unconstitutional Conditions Upon Public Employment: New Departures In The Protection Of First Amendment Rights, Harold H. Bruff
Articles
No abstract provided.