Law Commons^™

“Reasoning-Lite” In The Violent Video Game Case, Alan Garfield

Alan E Garfield

One might have expected that the Supreme Court’s recent decision in the violent video game case, Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Ass’n, would have been a thoughtful balancing of society’s competing interests in protecting freedom of speech and protecting children from harm. After all, the Supreme Court had held decades earlier that the government could deny minors access to soft-porn, or what the Court called “girlie magazines.” So one could have assumed the Court would seriously consider California’s claim that minors also needed sheltering from the grittier world of violent video game rapes, beheadings, and ethnic cleansings. Yet, as Justice Scalia’s …

First Amendment Protects Crude Protest Of Police Action, Martin A. Schwartz

Martin A. Schwartz

No abstract provided.

New York City Zones Out Free Expression, Martin A. Schwartz

Martin A. Schwartz

No abstract provided.

The Supreme Court Rules In Favor Of Religious Club’S Right To Meet On Public School Premises: Is This “Good News” For First Amendment Rights?, Thomas A. Schweitzer

Thomas A. Schweitzer

No abstract provided.

How Much Does A Belief Cost?: Revisiting The Marketplace Of Ideas, Gregory Brazeal

Gregory Brazeal

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. is often credited with creating the metaphor of “the marketplace of ideas,” though he did not use the exact phrase and his argument for free speech was not based on distinctively economic reasoning. Truly economic investigations of the marketplace of ideas have progressed in step with developments and trends in the law and economics literature. These investigations have tended to be one-sided, with writers focusing primarily either on the production of ideas (for example, Posner) or their consumption (for example, behavioral law and economics), without considering in depth how producers and consumers interact. This may …

Badmouthing Authority: Hostile Speech About School Officials And The Limits Of School Restrictions, Emily Gold Waldman

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

The Article's first two parts discuss the extent to which schools can legally restrict hostile student speech about school officials, should they choose to do so. Part I examines how courts have traditionally approached hostile student speech about school officials when it occurs at school, and Part II then considers how courts have been analyzing the issue when it moves off campus. In the course of this discussion, the Article identifies three key categories of such speech: (1) speech that arguably threatens toward a school official; (2) speech that is primarily vulgar about a school official; and (3) the most …

Reuven Avi-Yonah's Citizens United And The Corporate Form: Still Unuseful, William Wilson Bratton

Articles

I welcome Avi-Yonah's new deployments of descriptive theories of the corporation. But I traversed this territory years ago and came away with a skeptical view of the enterprise. Although Avi-Yonah's interventions are compelling in the encounter, I remain unconvinced that the theories have important lessons to teach us.

Cohen V. Google, Inc., Eirik Cheverud

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

Epic Considerations: The Speech That The Supreme Court Would Not Hear In Snyder V. Phelps, Jeffrey Shulman

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In declining to consider the “epic” posted by the Westboro Baptist Church on its web site, the Supreme Court took most (but not quite all) of the good constitutional stuff out of Snyder v. Phelps. The Court may have sought to make this an easy case by considering only the contents of the church’s picketing placards. For the Court, the placards highlighted such issues of public import as “the political and moral conduct of the United States and its citizens, the fate of our nation, homosexuality in the military, and scandals involving the Catholic clergy.” On grounds that we …

Corporate First Amendment Rights After Citizens United: An Analysis Of The Popular Movement To End The Constitutional Personhood Of Corporations, Susanna K. Ripken

Susanna K. Ripken

No case in the Supreme Court’s last term was more controversial than Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (Citizens United). In a sharply divided 5:4 decision, the Court invalidated strict federal campaign finance laws and upheld the First Amendment right of corporations to spend unlimited sums of corporate money to support or oppose candidates in political elections. Although mainstream criticism of Citizens United was fierce and widely publicized, a lesser known response to the case is a grassroots popular movement calling for an amendment to the Constitution establishing that money is not speech and that human beings, not corporations, are …

First Amendment Investigations And The Inescapable Pragmatism Of The Common Law Of Free Speech, Lawrence Rosenthal

Lawrence Rosenthal

Scholars have struggled to explain our sprawling First Amendment doctrine – once described by Justice Stevens as “an elaborate mosaic of specific judicial decisions, characteristic of the common law process of case-by-case adjudication.” The position that has gained the most traction in recent scholarship has stressed the primacy of governmental motive – this school of thought argues that the degree of scrutiny to be afforded a challenged regulation is based on an assessment of the likelihood that the regulation reflects a governmental motive to burden disfavored speech or speakers.

This article offers a challenge to the purposivist account. It begins, …