Law Commons^™

The Colonel's Finest Campaign: Robert R. Mccormick And Near V. Minnesota, Eric Easton

All Faculty Scholarship

Today, media corporations and their professional and trade associations, along with organizations like Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and the American Civil Liberties Union, carefully monitor litigation that implicates First Amendment values and decide whether, when, and how to intervene. It was not always so. Litigation by an institutional press to avoid or create doctrinal precedent under the First Amendment really began with the appointment of Col. Robert R. McCormick to head the ANPA's Committee on Freedom of the Press in the spring of 1928 and his involvement in Near v. Minnesota beginning that fall. Because of McCormick's …

This Gun For Hire: Dancing In The Dark Of The First Amendment, Michael I. Meyerson

All Faculty Scholarship

Classified advertisements in newspapers and magazines represent a uniquely democratic access to the media for the individual. Without having to pay the thousands of dollars for full-page advertisements, buyers and sellers can purchase space for their offers for only a few dollars, yet have them seen by city-wide or nation-wide audiences. Democracy, though, breeds its own excesses, and the legal question is always how to control that excess without harming the freedom.

As befits a medium open to all, classified advertisements run the gamut of human activity, from the sale of a used automobile to employment to lonely singles looking …