Law Commons^™

Censorship 101, Sonja R. West

Popular Media

This article looks at censorship in the public school setting.

Government Nonendorsement, Nelson Tebbe

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

What are the constitutional limits on government endorsement? Judges and scholars typically assume that when the government speaks on its own account, it faces few restrictions. In fact, they often say that the only real restriction on government speech is the Establishment Clause. On this view, officials cannot endorse, say, Christianity, but otherwise they enjoy wide latitude to promote democracy or denigrate smoking. Two doctrines and their accompanying literatures have fed this impression. First, the Court’s recent free speech cases have suggested that government speech is virtually unfettered. Second, experts on religious freedom have long assumed that there is no …

Secondary Speech And The Protective Approach To Interpretive Dualities In The Roberts Court, Nat Stern

Scholarly Publications

No abstract provided.

Democratic Development And The Public Sphere: The Rights To Hear And Be Heard In Ghana, Duke Law School Seminar And Fact-Finding Trip To Ghana

Duke Law Student Papers Series

No abstract provided.

Decoding Civility, Kerri Lynn Stone

Faculty Publications

If women outnumber men in graduate schools and are entering professional and other workplaces in unprecedented numbers, and if Title VII has aimed to eradicate workplace discrimination for almost fifty years, why are women still so woefully underrepresented at the highest levels of power, leadership, wealth, and prestige in the contemporary workplace? This Article is about abusive speech in the workplace. It explores how the expression of bias in the workplace has evolved and been shaped by anti-discrimination legislation and jurisprudence. It identifies a category of biased speech that eludes prosecution under Title VII. Moreover, this Article seeks to provide …

The New American Privacy, Richard J. Peltz-Steele

Faculty Publications

Conventional wisdom paints U.S. and European approaches to privacy at irreconcilable odds. But that portrayal overlooks a more nuanced reality of privacy in American law. The free speech imperative of U.S. constitutional law since the civil rights movement shows signs of tarnish. And in areas of law that have escaped constitutionalization, such as fair-use copyright and the freedom of information, developing personality norms resemble European-style balancing. Recent academic and political initiatives on privacy in the United States emphasize subject control and contextual analysis, reflecting popular thinking not so different after all from that which animates Europe’s 1995 directive and 2012 …

An Intersystemic View Of Intellectual Property And Free Speech, Mark Bartholomew, John Tehranian

Journal Articles

Intellectual property regimes operate in the shadow of the First Amendment. By deeming a particular activity as infringing, the law of copyright, trademark, and the right of publicity all limit communication. As a result, judges and lawmakers must delicately balance intellectual property rights with expressive freedoms. Interestingly, each intellectual property regime strikes the balance between ownership rights and free speech in a dramatically different way. Despite a large volume of scholarship on intellectual property rights and free speech considerations, this Article represents the first systematic effort to detail, analyze, and explain the divergent evolution of expression-based defenses in copyright, trademark, …

No Jokes About Dope: Morse V. Frederick's Educational Rationale, Emily Gold Waldman

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

This piece begins with a “protective” reading of Morse v. Frederick, showing how this rationale provides a good starting point in understanding Morse but is ultimately incomplete. Indeed, Justice Stevens’ dissent is largely an argument that the protective rationale falls short here. I then re-examine Morse from the perspective of the educational rationale and conclude that the underlying, largely unstated premise of the Morse majority is that schools—as part of teaching students about the gravity of drug use—should be able to convey disapproval of messages suggesting that drug use is a joking or trivial matter. This helps to explain why …

University Imprimaturs On Student Speech: The Certification Cases, Emily Gold Waldman

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

The Article begins in Part I by describing these three student speech cases and then examining what makes them a distinct category within the larger student speech landscape. As I discuss, the student speech framework was largely developed by the Supreme Court in the K-12 public school context. Conflicts over student speech in universities, in turn, have generally centered on the extent to which the K-12 framework should carry over to the higher education context, given the greater independence and maturity of university students. Recent cases about universities' ability to control student publications, for example, fall into this mold, with …

Do Graphic Tobacco Warnings Violate The First Amendment?, Nathan Cortez

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

When Congress passed the nation’s first comprehensive tobacco bill in 2009, it replaced the familiar Surgeon General’s warnings, last updated in 1984, with nine blunter warnings. The law also directed the U.S. Food and Drug Administration ('FDA') to require color graphics to accompany the textual warnings. By law, the warnings would cover the top fifty percent of the front and back of tobacco packaging and the top twenty percent of print advertisements, bringing the United States closer to many peer countries that now require graphic warnings. Tobacco companies challenged the requirement on First Amendment grounds, arguing that the compelled disclosures …

Neutral No More: Secondary Effects Analysis And The Quiet Demise Of The Content-Neutrality Test, Mark L. Rienzi

Scholarly Articles

When the Supreme Court introduced the “secondary effects” doctrine to allow for zoning of adult businesses, critics fell into two camps. Some, like Justice Brennan, predicted dire consequences for the First Amendment, particularly if the doctrine were used in political speech cases. Others, like Professor Laurence Tribe, predicted secondary effects analysis would be limited to sexually explicit speech, and would not threaten the First Amendment. The modern consensus is that the doctrine has, in fact, been limited to cases about sex.

Recent cases demonstrate, however, that the impact of the secondary effects doctrine on the First Amendment has been broader …