Law Commons^™

Warren/Burger Courts Exalted “Free” Expression Over Other American Values, Louis W. Hensler Iii

Marquette Law Review

Anglo-American defamation law started with a simple condemnation of the sin of evil speaking. Eventually, this value condemning harmful speech was accommodated to the value of speaking the truth, even hurtful truth. A third value of fostering responsible self-government was injected into American defamation law at and around the time of the American Revolution. This value makes it especially important for citizens to freely speak even hurtful truth about their government.

When The Digital Services Act Goes Global, Anupam Chander

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The European Union’s Digital Services Act (“DSA”) establishes a “meta law”—public regulation of the private regulation conducted by internet platforms. The DSA offers an attempt to balance private technological power with democratic oversight. The DSA will likely prove an attractive model for other governments to assert control over massive global internet platforms. What happens when other countries borrow its approach, in an instantiation of the vaunted Brussels Effect? This Article evaluates the DSA using the “Putin Test”—asking what if an authoritarian leader were given the powers granted by the DSA? The Article argues that authoritarians might well exploit various mechanisms …

The Kids Are All Right: The Law Of Free Expression And New Information Technologies, Mark Tushnet

Catholic University Law Review

Recently the literature on free expression has turned to the question, should the law of free expression be adjusted because of the availability of new information technologies (hereafter NIT), and if so, how? The only thing about NIT that distinguishes them from traditional media is that disseminating expression via NIT is much less expensive than doing so via traditional media. The tenor of recent scholarship on NIT and free expression is that the invention of NIT does support some modification of free expression law. This Essay argues that that conclusion might be correct, but that many of the arguments offered …

Expression Of Lgbtq Student Sexual Orientation And Gender Identity In The K-12 Educational System, Brian Boggs

Mitchell Hamline Law Journal of Public Policy and Practice

No abstract provided.

"Balancing" Free Expression And Religious Feelings In E.S. V. Austria: Blasphemy By Any Other Name?, John G. Wrench

Case Western Reserve Journal of International Law

The European Court of Human Rights’ 2018 decision in E.S. v. Austria upheld an Austrian court’s conviction based on “disparaging religious doctrine.” The Court took this opportunity to reaffirm problematic, decades-old precedent, while creating new contradictions in its analysis of free expression claims. Despite the EU’s modern opposition to the criminalization of blasphemy, E.S. v. Austria in effect sends a contradictory message. This Comment explores the roots of the Court’s struggle to find an appropriate balance between the values of religious tolerance and freedom of expression, analyzes the Court’s recent decision, and suggests future paths to recalibrate the Court’s approach …

Trial Monitoring Of People V. Miti Et Al. (Zambia 2018), Human Rights Institute, Beth Van Schaack

Human Rights Institute

Between September and December 2018, TrialWatch monitored the trial of six
activists in Zambia, who were arrested and charged under the Public Order Act in
connection with an anti-corruption protest they organized in 2017. On December 21, 2018, the judge dismissed the charges and acquitted all six defendants.

Although the trial itself was generally fair, and Judge Mwaka Chigali Mikalile is to be commended in this regard, the proceedings were infected with prosecutorial misconduct in pursuing spurious charges based upon patently insufficient evidence.

Copyright Policy As Catalyst And Barrier To Innovation And Free Expression, Amanda Reid

Catholic University Law Review

At its core, copyright is an innovation policy, a competition policy, and a free expression policy. Copyright seeks to balance incentivizing a public good with providing a private interest. Copyright’s purpose to catalyze creative expression and innovation is canonical; creativity and innovation are synergetic. Copyright is a means of promoting progress; copyright is not an end in itself. Much like freedom of expression and new innovations are not ends in themselves, copyright protection is not for its own sake. Freedom of expression is often heralded as a means of fostering democratic self-governance, truth, and happiness. Innovation is seen as a …

Intermediaries And Private Speech Regulation: A Transatlantic Dialogue - Workshop Report, Tiffany Li

Faculty Scholarship

The Wikimedia/Yale Law School Initiative on Intermediaries and Information (WIII) at Yale Law School has released a comprehensive report synthesizing key insights from intermediary liability and online speech and expression experts in Europe and the United States.

The report focuses on the critical but complicated issue of private speech regulation on the internet and the connections between platform liability laws and fundamental rights, including free expression. The report reflects discussions held at “Intermediaries & Private Speech Regulation: A Transatlantic Dialogue,” an invitation-only workshop convened by WIII, featuring leading internet law experts from the United States and Europe.

This report highlights …

Global Platform Governance: Private Power In The Shadow Of The State, Hannah Bloch-Wehba

SMU Law Review

Online intermediaries—search engines, social media platforms, even e-commerce businesses—are increasingly required to make critical decisions about free expression, individual privacy, and property rights under domestic law. These requirements arise in contexts that include the right to be forgotten, hate speech,“ terrorist” speech, and copyright and intellectual property. At the same time, these disputes about online speech are increasingly borderless. Many laws targeting online speech and privacy are explicitly extraterritorial in scope. Even when not, some courts have ruled that they have jurisdiction to enforce compliance on a global scale. And governments are also demanding that platforms remove content—on a global …

The Problem Isn't Just Backpage: Revising Section 230 Immunity, Danielle K. Citron, Benjamin Wittes

Faculty Scholarship

Backpage is a classifieds hub that hosts “80 percent of the online advertising for illegal commercial sex in the United States.” This is not by happenstance but rather by design. Evidence suggests that the advertising hub selectively removed postings discouraging sex trafficking. The site also tailored its rules to protect the practice from detection, including allowing anonymized email and photographs stripped of metadata. Under the prevailing interpretation of 47 U.S.C. § 230 (“Section 230”) of the CDA, however, Backpage would be immune from liability connected to sex trafficking even though it proactively helped sex traffickers from getting caught. No matter …

Professional Standards And The First Amendment In Higher Education: When Institutional Academic Freedom Collides With Student Speech Rights, Clay Calvert

St. John's Law Review

(Excerpt)

Using the decisions in Keefe, Oyama and Tatro as analytical springboards, this Article examines rising tensions between institutional academic freedom and the First Amendment speech rights of college students. Specifically, the friction addressed here occurs when universities enforce external professional standards on students within their curricula. Initially, Part I provides a primer on institutional academic freedom. Part II then contrasts the vastly deferential Hazelwood approach to professional-standards disputes embraced by the Eighth Circuit in Keefe with the somewhat more rigorous ones adopted by the Ninth Circuit in Oyama and Minnesota’s Supreme Court in Tatro.

Part III then …

Beyond Intermediary Liability: The Future Of Information Platforms - Workshop Report, Tiffany Li

Faculty Scholarship

On February 13, 2018, WIII hosted the workshop, “Beyond Intermediary Liability: The Future of Information Platforms.” Leading experts from industry, civil society, and academia convened at Yale Law School for a series of non-public, guided discussions. The roundtable of experts considered pressing questions related to intermediary liability and the rights, roles, and responsibilities of information platforms in society. Based on conversations from the workshop, WIII published a free, publicly available report detailing the most critical issues necessary for understanding the role of information platforms, such as Facebook and Google, in law and society today. The report highlights insights and questions …

Fourth & Inches: Marking The Line Of Athletes’ Free Speech (A Colin Kaepernick Inspired Discussion), Ryan J. Mcginty

Pace Intellectual Property, Sports & Entertainment Law Forum

This note addresses the ongoing controversial stance that was ignited when Colin Kaepernick refused to stand for the playing of the national anthem in protest of what he deems are wrongdoings against African Americans and minorities in the United States. The scope of this note does not surround Kaepernick himself, but rather the professional NFL football player in general. Specifically, players are entitled to the full rights of free expression and free speech as human beings and public figures, up and until the line where that right is abused on the field or “on the job,” thereby threatening an increase …

Extremist Speech, Compelled Conformity, And Censorship Creep, Danielle K. Citron

Faculty Scholarship

Silicon Valley has long been viewed as a full-throated champion of First Amendment values. The dominant online platforms, however, have recently adopted speech policies and processes that depart from the U.S. model. In an agreement with the European Commission, tech companies have pledged to respond to reports of hate speech within twenty-four hours, a hasty process that may trade valuable expression for speedy results. Plans have been announced for an industry database that will allow the same companies to share hashed images of banned extremist content for review and removal elsewhere.

These changes are less the result of voluntary market …

Four Principles For Digital Expression (You Won't Believe #3!), Danielle K. Citron, Neil Richards

Faculty Scholarship

At the dawn of the Internet’s emergence, the Supreme Court rhapsodized about its potential as a tool for free expression and political liberation. In ACLU v. Reno (1997), the Supreme Court adopted a bold vision of Internet expression to strike down a federal law - the Communications Decency Act - that restricted digital expression to forms that were merely “decent.” Far more than the printing press, the Court explained, the mid-90s Internet enabled anyone to become a town crier. Communication no longer required the permission of powerful entities. With a network connection, the powerless had as much luck reaching a …

The Search For An Egalitarian First Amendment, Jeremy K. Kessler, David E. Pozen

Faculty Scholarship

Over the past decade, the Roberts Court has handed down a series of rulings that demonstrate the degree to which the First Amendment can be used to thwart economic and social welfare regulation – generating widespread accusations that the Court has created a "new Lochner." This introduction to the Columbia Law Review's Symposium on Free Expression in an Age of Inequality takes up three questions raised by these developments: Why has First Amendment law become such a prominent site for struggles over socioeconomic inequality? Does the First Amendment tradition contain egalitarian elements that could be recovered? And what might a …

The Resilience Of Noxious Doctrine: The 2016 Election, The Marketplace Of Ideas, And The Obstinacy Of Bias, Leonard M. Niehoff, Deeva Shah

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

The Supreme Court has recognized the central role that free expression plays in our democratic enterprise. In his dissenting opinion in United States v. Abrams, Justice Holmes offered a theory of how free expression advances our search for truth and our cultivation of an informed electorate. That model—often called the “marketplace of ideas,” based upon the metaphor used by Holmes—has proven to be one of the most persistent and influential concepts in First Amendment jurisprudence.

The marketplace of ideas model essentially holds that free expression serves our democratic goals by allowing differing proposed truths and versions of the facts …

The “Sovereigns Of Cyberspace” And State Action: The First Amendment’S Application (Or Lack Thereof) To Third-Party Platforms, Jonathan Peters

Scholarly Works

Many scholars have commented that the state action doctrine forecloses use of the First Amendment to constrain the policies and practices of online service providers. But few have comprehensively studied this issue, and the seminal article exploring “[c]yberspace and the [s]tate [a]ction [d]ebate” is fifteen years old, published before the U.S. Supreme Court reformulated the federal approach to state action. It is important to give the state action doctrine regular scholarly attention, not least because it is increasingly clear that “the private sector has a shared responsibility to help safeguard free expression.” It is critical to understand whether the First …

Copyright’S Other Functions, Margaret Chon

Chicago-Kent Journal of Intellectual Property

This response to a keynote speech by Judge Margaret McKeown explores some dimensions of copyright in addition to its dominant function as a set of market-facilitating exclusive rights. The recent possible trend towards protecting privacy and other non-commercial concerns via copyright law is not necessarily inconsistent with its historical usages, does not necessarily threaten freedom of expression and may further important privacy policies. The balance of these competing policies is shifting, especially in an environment of proliferating digital content where cyber civil rights may need further development in response to cyberbullying. It examines the specific case of non-consensual pornography as …

Post-Katrina Suppression Of Black Working-Class Political Expression, Taunya L. Banks

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Overcriminalizing Speech, Michal Buchhandler-Raphael

Scholarly Articles

Recent years have seen a significant expansion in the criminal justice system’s use of various preemptive measures, aimed to prevent harm before it occurs. This development consists of adopting a myriad of prophylactic statutes, including endangerment crimes, which target behaviors that merely pose a risk of future harm but are not in themselves harmful at the time they are committed.

This Article demonstrates that a significant portion of these endangerment crimes criminalize various forms of speech and expression. Examples include conspiracies, attempts, verbal harassment, instructional speech on how to commit crimes, and possession crimes. The Article argues that in contrast …

Exotic Dancing: Taxable Gyrations Or Exempt Art, John O. Hayward

John O. Hayward

Exotic dancers usually embroil themselves in censorship battles with local authorities. But recently they have drawn the attention of tax authorities who have tussled with the owners of so-called “gentlemen’s clubs” over whether the exotic dancing performed in their establishments are subject to taxation. This paper examines several recent cases where state authorities choose to tax exotic dancing while at the same time exempting what some jurists regard as comparable choreographic performances. In the opinion of these commentators, the tax authorities exhibited a bias against low-brow artistic expression, thus engaging in impermissible content discrimination. It advances the proposition that judges …

“Can I Profit From My Own Name And Likeness As A College Athlete?” The Predictive Legal Analytics Of A College Player’S Publicity Rights Vs. First Amendment Rights Of Others, Roger M. Groves

Roger M. Groves

Two federal court decisions during 2013 have changed the game for college students versus the schools, the NCAA and video game makers. This article explores whether for the first time in history these athletes can profit from their own name and likeness and prevent others from doing so. But those cases still leave many untested applications to new facts – facts that the courts have not faced. Particularly intriguing is how 21st Century technology will apply to this area in future litigation. No publicity rights case or article to date has explored the application of predictive analytics, computer programs, algorithms, …

On Business Torts And The First Amendment, Richard J. Peltz-Steele

Faculty Publications

A gaping question in free speech law surrounds the application of the First Amendment defense in business torts. The pervasiveness of communication technologies, the flourishing of privacy law, and the mere passage of time have precipitated an escalation in tort cases in which communication, and what the defendant may allege is free speech, lies at the heart of the matter.

The New American Privacy, Richard J. Peltz-Steele

Faculty Publications

The European Union sparked an intercontinental furor last year with proposed legislation to supersede the 1995 Data Protection Directive (DPD). The EU Parliament approved legislation in a 49-3 committee vote in October. The text, which is not yet published in its current draft at the time of this writing, may yet be amended before being accepted by the union’s 28 member states. The legislation is billed a money saver because it would harmonize EU member states’ data protection laws, which have diverged under the DPD umbrella. The business community is not convinced, fearful that costly new demands will strain balance …

In Tort Pursuit Of Mass Media: Big Tobacco, Big Banks, And Their Big Secrets, Richard J. Peltz-Steele, Eric J. Booth

Faculty Publications

This article examines potential civil liability under the multistate norms of tort and closely related areas in the common law of the United States for the mass media re-publisher of leaked corporate secrets. The examination employs two fact patterns derived from real cases: one, contemporary, an international bank's grievance, never resolved on the merits in court, against the online publisher WikiLeaks; and second, conventional, a tobacco manufacturer's grievance, feared but never filed, against the television newsmagazine 60 Minutes. The study assumes jurisdiction arguendo and examines liability theories in tortious interference; unfair-competition law; and conversion, trade-secret appropriation, and related theories of …

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, …

Disengage And Obstruct: The Un-Of-Values And The Human Rights Council, Kenneth Anderson

Contributions to Books

The following is a sample chapter from a book on US-UN relations, "Living with the UN." The book offers an analysis of policies available to the United States in its dealings with the United Nations, and offers "heuristics" of engagement to guide US dealings with different parts and functions of the UN. These policy rules of thumb are framed around a larger (mostly sharply critical, particularly in this chapter) analysis of "multilateral engagement" that is presented earlier in the book and which is a combination of analysis specific to US-UN relations and to US foreign policy generally. This book breaks …

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

Martin A. Schwartz

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 …