Law Commons^™

Drone Federalism: Civilian Drones And The Things They Carry, Margot E. Kaminski

Publications

Civilian drones are scheduled to be permitted in the national airspace as early as 2015. Many think Congress should establish the necessary nationwide regulations to govern both law enforcement and civilian drone use. That thinking, however, is wrong. This Essay suggests drone federalism instead: a state-based approach to privacy regulation that governs drone use by civilians, drawing on states’ experience regulating other forms of civilian-on-civilian surveillance. This approach will allow necessary experimentation in how to best balance privacy concerns against First Amendment rights in the imminent era of drone-use democratization. This Essay closes by providing some guidance to states as …

Ferlinghetti On Trial: The Howl Court Case And Juvenile Delinquency, Joel E. Black

Journal Articles

In spring 1957 the Juvenile Division of the San Francisco Police Department seized copies of Howl and charged the poem's publisher, Lawrence Felinghetti, with obscenity. Tried in summer 1957 and defended by the American Civil Liberties Union, Ferlinghetti was exonerated by a District Court judge. Scholars typically place the Howl trial at the beginning of a cultural and social revolution that flourished in the 1960s or place it amid the personal lives and rebellions of the actors composing the Beat Generation. However, these treatments do not fully consider the ways the prosecution reflected trends in law, shaped debates over juvenile …

To Drink The Cup Of Fury: Funeral Picketing, Public Discourse And The First Amendment, Steven J. Heyman

All Faculty Scholarship

In Snyder v. Phelps, the Supreme Court held that the Westboro Baptist Church had a First Amendment right to picket the funeral of a young soldier killed in Iraq. This decision reinforces a position that has become increasingly prevalent in First Amendment jurisprudence – the view that the state may not regulate public discourse to protect individuals from emotional or dignitary injury. In this Article, I argue that this view is deeply problematic for two reasons: it unduly sacrifices the value of individual personality and it tends to undermine the sphere of public discourse itself by negating the practical and …

With Religious Liberty For All: A Defense Of The Affordable Care Act's Contraception Coverage Mandate, Frederick Mark Gedicks

Faculty Scholarship

The “contraception mandate” of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 poses a straightforward question for religious liberty jurisprudence: Must government excuse a believer from complying with a religiously burdensome law, when doing so would violate the liberty of others by imposing on them the costs and consequences of religious beliefs that they do not share? To ask this question is to answer it: One's religious liberty does not include the right to interfere with the liberty of others, and thus religious liberty may not be used by a religious employer to force employees to pay the costs …

Smile For The Camera - The Long Lost Photos Of The Supreme Court At Work—And What They Reveal., Sonja R. West

Popular Media

In a day when even our cellphones can capture images unobtrusively, why were we forced to stare at pixels on our computer screens or at a static televised image of the Supreme Court’s exterior? In 2012, why is there a wall of separation between the American people and their high court?

For decades, the debate over cameras in the court has gone something like this: the press pleads for permission and the court says no; academics make policy arguments that the court ignores; and Congress threatens to force cameras into the court, but the justices don’t blink. The argument remains …

Defining Religion Down: Hasanna-Tabor, Martinez, And The U.S. Supreme Court, Carl H. Esbeck

Faculty Publications

While two recent Supreme Court cases on religious freedom appear sharply at odds, in one material respect they harmonize around an understanding that religion is fully protected only when exercised in private. CLS v. Martinez involved Hastings College of Law. Hastings' regulation of extracurricular organizations was unusual in requiring that any student can join an organization. This all-comers rule had a discriminatory impact on organizations with exclusionary memberships, such as the Christian Legal Society (CLS) which required subscribing to a statement of faith and conduct. The Court acknowledged the discriminatory effect, but said that the Free Speech Clause protects speech …

Free Expression And Censorship: The Evolving Role Of American Companies In The Age Of The Internet, Daniel Witt

In the Balance

No abstract provided.

Public Forum 2.1: Public Higher Education Institutions And Social Media, Robert H. Jerry Ii, Lyrissa Barnett Lidsky

UF Law Faculty Publications

Like most of us, public colleges and universities increasingly are communicating via Facebook, Second Life, YouTube, Twitter and other social media. Unlike most of us, public colleges and universities are government actors, and their social media communications present complex administrative and First Amendment challenges. The authors of this article — one the dean of a major public university law school responsible for directing its social media strategies, the other a scholar of social media and the First Amendment — have combined their expertise to help public university officials address these challenges. To that end, this article first examines current and …

Public Forum 2.1: Public Higher Education Institutions And Social Media, Robert H. Jerry Ii, Lyrissa Lidsky

Faculty Publications

Public colleges and universities increasingly are using Facebook, Second Life, YouTube, Twitter, and other social media communications tools. Yet public colleges and universities are government actors, and their creation and maintenance of social media sites or forums create difficult constitutional and administrative challenges. Our separate experiences, both theoretical and practical, have convinced us of the value of providing guidance for public higher education institutions wishing to engage with their constituents-including prospective, current, and former students and many others-through social media.

Together, we seek to guide public university officials through the complex body of law governing their social media use and …

Putting State Courts In The Constitutional Driver's Seat: State Taxpayer Standing After Cuno And Winn, Edward A. Zelinsky

Articles

This article explores the implications of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decisions in DaimlerChrysler Corp. v. Cuno and Arizona Christian School Tuition Organization v. Winn. In Cuno and Winn, the Court held that state taxpayers lacked standing in the federal courts. Because the states have more liberal taxpayer standing rules than do the federal courts, Cuno and Winn will not terminate taxpayers’ constitutional challenges to state taxes and expenditures, but will instead channel such challenges from the federal courts (where taxpayers do not have standing) to the state courts (where they do). Moreover, municipal taxpayer standing in the federal courts, which …

Religion, Government, And Law In The Contemporary United States, Daniel O. Conkle

Articles by Maurer Faculty

In this Essay, I discuss the relationship between religion and government in the contemporary United States, addressing the period from the 1940s to the present. In so doing, I explore questions of religious liberty, including the protection of religious “free exercise” as well as the constitutional prohibition on the establishment of religion, a prohibition that sometimes - but not always - has been construed to require a “wall of separation” between church and state. I focus especially on the Supreme Court’s evolving interpretations of the First Amendment during this period, which, I suggest, were influenced by broader religious, cultural, and …

Chick-Fil-A And The Problem Of Soft Censorship, Nathan B. Oman

Popular Media

No abstract provided.

Common Law Constitutionalism, The Constitutional Common Law, And The Validity Of The Individual Mandate, Abigail R. Moncrieff

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

The paper proceeds as follows. Part I describes the constitutional common law and its interactions with common-law constitutionalism. Part II uses the fight over the constitutionality of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) and its so-called "individual mandate" as a case study to flesh out the core differences between common-law constitutionalism and constitutional common law. Part III argues that a viable justification for a living constitution needs to embrace and defend the courts' essentially political nature, confronting head-on the (skyscraper) originalists' sense that courts should never do politics.

First Amendment Protection For Union Appeals To Consumers, Michael C. Harper

Faculty Scholarship

This article explains why decisions of the National Labor Relations Board under President Obama holding non-picketing secondary appeals to consumers not to be illegal under the National Labor Relations Act were necessary under a 1988 decision of the Supreme Court, Edward J. DeBartolo Corp. v. Florida Gulf Coast Building & Construction Trades Council. The article also explains why both the Supreme Court decision and the Board’s recent decisions were compelled by the first amendment and could not be based on the language of § 8(b)(4)(ii)(B) of the National Labor Relations Act as interpreted by the Court in other cases. The …

New Technologies And Constitutional Law, Thomas Fetzer, Christopher S. Yoo

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Of Speech And Sanctions: Toward A Penalty-Sensitive Approach To The First Amendment, Michael Coenen

Journal Articles

Courts confronting First Amendment claims do not often scrutinize the severity of a speaker’s punishment. Embracing a “penalty-neutral” understanding of the free-speech right, these courts tend to treat an individual’s expression as either protected, in which case the government may not punish it at all, or unprotected, in which case the government may punish it to a very great degree. There is, however, a small but important body of “penalty-sensitive” case law that runs counter to the penalty-neutral norm. Within this case law, the severity of a speaker’s punishment affects the merits of her First Amendment claim, thus giving rise …

Privacy Rights: The Virtue Of Protecting A False Reputation, John A. Humbach

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

What is the virtue of protecting a false reputation? The thesis of this paper is that there is none. There is none, at least, that justifies the suppression of free speech. Yet, there is a growing trend to see the protection of reputation from truth as a key function of the so-called “right of privacy.”

Unfortunately, people often do things that they are not proud of or do not want others to know about. Often, however, these are precisely the things that others want or need to know. For our own protection, each of us is better off being aware …

Ideology "All The Way Down"? An Empirical Study Of Establishment Clause Decisions In The Federal Courts, Gregory C. Sisk, Michael Heise

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Wikileaks And The Institutional Framework For National Security Disclosures, Patricia L. Bellia

Journal Articles

WikiLeaks’ successive disclosures of classified U.S. documents throughout 2010 and 2011 invite comparison to publishers’ decisions forty years ago to release portions of the Pentagon Papers, the classified analytic history of U.S. policy in Vietnam. The analogy is a powerful weapon for WikiLeaks’ defenders. The Supreme Court’s decision in the Pentagon Papers case signaled that the task of weighing whether to publicly disclose leaked national security information would fall to publishers, not the executive or the courts, at least in the absence of an exceedingly grave threat of harm.

The lessons of the Pentagon Papers case for WikiLeaks, however, are …

Implications Of Libel Doctrine For Nondefamatory Falsehoods Under The First Amendement, Nat Stern

Scholarly Publications

No abstract provided.

Do Religious Tax Exemptions Entangle In Violation Of The Establishment Clause? The Constitutionality Of The Parsonage Allowance Exclusion And The Religious Exemptions Of The Individual Health Care Mandate And The Fica And Self-Employment Taxes, Edward A. Zelinsky

Articles

In Freedom From Religion Foundation v. Geithner, the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) argues that Code Section 107 and the income tax exclusion that section grants to “minister[s] of the gospel” for parsonage allowances violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. This case has important implications for a new federal law mandating that individuals maintain “minimum essential” health care coverage for themselves and their dependents. That mandate contains two religious exemptions. One of these exemptions incorporates a pre-existing religious exemption from the federal self-employment tax. These sectarian exemptions raise the same First Amendment issues as does the Code’s exclusion …

First Amendment Privacy And The Battle For Progressively Liberal Social Change, Anita L. Allen

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

(Government) Speech Spaces, Timothy Zick

Popular Media

No abstract provided.

Architectural Trusteeship, Timothy Zick

Popular Media

No abstract provided.

Speech And Spatiality, Timothy Zick

Popular Media

No abstract provided.

The New Victims Of The Old Anti-Catholicism, Christopher C. Lund

Law Faculty Research Publications

Santayana once said that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, the implication being that we can avoid future mistakes by paying better attention to past ones. Perhaps this is so. Or perhaps it is as George Bernard Shaw once said-that we learn from history only that we learn nothing from history. Yet one thing is surely clear. To the extent that modern injustices have identifiable historical antecedents, we rightly stand doubly condemned for them.

This Essay looks at four modern church-state cases which span the First Amendment spectrum. The plaintiffs are religiously diverse-one is a …

The Value Of Valor: Money, Medals And Military Labor, Mateo Taussig-Rubbo

Journal Articles

The United States Supreme Court recently overturned the Stolen Valor Act on the grounds that the law’s blanket prohibition on falsely claiming to have received a military medal or decoration violated the First Amendment right to free speech. This Article uses the controversy provoked by the law to explore the implications of offering compensation for military service in the form of medals. How is compensation in medals related to monetary compensation? Querying the distinctions between money and medals — and the ways in which the boundaries around medals are drawn and policed — offers a means of considering the forms …

Antisemitism In The Academic Voice: Confronting Bigotry Under The First Amendment, Kenneth Lasson

All Faculty Scholarship

The romanticized vision of life in the Ivory Tower - a peaceful haven where learned professors ponder higher thoughts and where students roam orderly quadrangles in quest of truth and other pleasures - has long been relegated to yesteryear. While universities like to nurture the perception that they are protectors of reasoned discourse, and indeed often perceive themselves as sacrosanct places of culture in a chaotic world, the modern campus, of course, is not quite so wonderful.

This chapter examines the relationship between antisemitic and anti-Zionist speech and conduct, how they both play out on contemporary university campuses - and …

Beyond The Water Cooler: Speech And The Workplace In An Era Of Social Media, Ann C. Mcginley

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

All Those Like You: Identity Aggression And Student Speech, Ari Ezra Waldman

Articles & Chapters

Online and face-to-face harassment in schools requires a coordinated response from the school, parents, students, and government. In this Article, I address a particular subset of online and face-to-face harassment, or identity-based harassment. Identity-based aggressors highlight a quality intrinsic to someone’s personhood and demean it, deprive it of value, and use it as a weapon. They attack women, racial minorities, religious minorities, and other traditionally victimized groups. And, as such, they attack not only their particular victims but also their victims’ communities. Identity-based aggressors com- mit a constitutional evil not only because their behavior interferes with victims’ access to education, …