Law Commons^™

Dysregulating The Media: Digital Redlining, Privacy Erosion, And The Unintentional Deregulation Of American Media, Jon M. Garon

Faculty Scholarship

Netflix, Amazon, YouTube, and Apple have been joined by Disney+, Twitch, Facebook, and others to supplant the broadcast industry. As the FCC, FTC, and other regulators struggle, a new digital divide has emerged. The current regulatory regime for television is built upon the government’s right to manage over-the-air broadcasting. As content producers shift away from broadcast and cable, much of the government’s regulatory control will end, resulting in new consequences for public policy and new challenges involving privacy, advertising, and antitrust law. Despite the technological change, there are compelling government interests in a healthy media environment. This article explores the …

Law And Politics, An Emerging Epidemic: A Call For Evidence-Based Public Health Law, Michael Ulrich

Faculty Scholarship

As Jacobson v. Massachusetts recognized in 1905, the basis of public health law, and its ability to limit constitutional rights, is the use of scientific data and empirical evidence. Far too often, this important fact is lost. Fear, misinformation, and politics frequently take center stage and drive the implementation of public health law. In the recent Ebola scare, political leaders passed unnecessary and unconstitutional quarantine measures that defied scientific understanding of the disease and caused many to have their rights needlessly constrained. Looking at HIV criminalization and exemptions to childhood vaccine requirements, it becomes clear that the blame cannot be …

Press Definition And The Religion Analogy, Ronnell Andersen Jones

Faculty Scholarship

n a Harvard Law Review Forum response to Professor Sonja West's symposium article, "Press Exceptionalism," Professor RonNell Andersen Jones critiques Professor West's effort to define "the press" for purposes of Press Clause exceptions and addresses the weaknesses of Professor West's analogy to Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church & School v. EEOC in drawing these definitional lines. The response highlights distinctions between Press Clause and Religion Clause jurisprudence and urges a more functional approach to press definition.

The Dangers Of Press Clause Dicta, Ronnell Andersen Jones

Faculty Scholarship

The United States Supreme Court has engaged in an unusual pattern of excessive dicta in cases involving the press. Indeed, a close examination of such cases reveals that it is one of the most consistent, defining characteristics of the U.S. Supreme Court’s media law jurisprudence in the last half century. The Court’s opinions in cases involving the media, while almost uniformly reaching conclusions based on other grounds, regularly include language about the constitutional or democratic character, duty, value, or role of the press — language that could be, but ultimately is not, significant to the constitutional conclusion reached. Although scholars …

What The Supreme Court Thinks Of The Press And Why It Matters, Ronnell Andersen Jones

Faculty Scholarship

Over the last fifty years, in cases involving the institutional press, the United States Supreme Court has offered characterizations of the purpose, duty, role, and value of the press in a democracy. An examination of the tone and quality of these characterizations over time suggests a downward trend, with largely favorable and praising characterizations of the press devolving into characterizations that are more distrusting and disparaging.

This Essay explores this trend, setting forth evidence of the Court’s changing view of the media—from the effusively complimentary depictions of the media during the Glory Days of the 1960s and 1970s to the …

Internet Governance And Democratic Legitimacy, Olivier Sylvain

Faculty Scholarship

Even as the Internet goes pop, federal policymakers continue to surrender their statutory obligation to regulate communications in the first instance to extralegal nongovernmental organizations comprised of technical experts. The Federal Communications Commission’s conclusion that a major broadband service provider's network management practices were unreasonable is a case in point. There, in the absence of any decisive legislative or even regulatory guidance, the FCC turned principally to the engineering principles on which the Internet Engineering Task Force bases transmission standards: to wit, (1) decentralization, (2) interoperability, and (3) user empowerment. This impulse to defer as a matter of course to …

News Media As Mediators, Carol Pauli

Faculty Scholarship

Journalism thrives on conflict, a classic "news value," which can make a story newsworthy. As a result, the normal routines of reporters and editors tend to emphasize extreme voices and combative themes, triggering the criticism that news coverage of an event is "more likely to escalate a conflict than to pacify it."

Even so, journalism has made some legendary journeys into conflict resolution. In 1977, for example, CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite conducted separate interviews with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, which led directly to Sadat's historic visit to Jerusalem. In 1985, Ted Koppel, in …

News Media As Mediators (Cardozo J. Conflict Resol.), Carol Pauli

Faculty Scholarship

This paper explores journalism as a potential method of conflict resolution. Part I compares the norms and practices of journalism to those of facilitative mediation. Part II draws additional parallels between some aspects of journalism and two other forms of dispute resolution: transformative mediation and adjudication. Part III suggests some areas for encouragement and some areas for caution as peace journalists import conflict resolution techniques into news reporting and writing.

History In Journalism And Journalism In History: Anthony Lewis And The Watergate Crisis, Pnina Lahav

Faculty Scholarship

Let me plunge right into a Lewis column to convey his marvelous craft in weaving the past into a contemporary moment. This one is from July 8, 1974. The column is about the oral argument before the Supreme Court in the Executive Privilege case, which was about to enter the constitutional canon as United States v. Nixon. Lewis writes as both eyewitness and commentator. He begins with constitutional history invoking Marbury v. Madison:

"It seemed at times like a constitutional casebook come to life. Marbury v. Madison was not only cited but, for a moment, debated. What exactly …