First Amendment Commons^™

Restoring Student Press Freedoms: Why Every State Needs A 'New Voices' Law, Clare R. Norins, Taran Harmon-Walker, Navroz Tharani

Scholarly Works

Scholastic journalists across America have long provided vital reporting, commentary, and fresh perspective on issues of public concern to their readers. Never has this been more true than in the current age of dwindling print media, where scholastic journalists at both the high school and post-secondary levels are stepping in to populate what would otherwise be news deserts. Yet the Supreme Court’s decision in Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier, 484 U.S. 260 (1988), allows school officials to censor both the content and style of school-sponsored media without offending the First Amendment. This essay traces the history of student speech rights …

What The Lawyers Who Sue The Press Think Of The Press, And Media Law, Jonathan Peters

Popular Media

“HAVE A SCORE TO SETTLE WITH THE PRESS? Charles Harder, the media lawyer who ground Gawker.com to dust, is your man.”

That was the subhead of a GQ profile of Harder published in 2016, after he won a $140 million jury verdict for Hulk Hogan against Gawker (later settled for $31 million). The profile went on to say that Harder had established himself “as perhaps the greatest threat in the United States to journalists, the First Amendment, and the very notion of a free press.”

Whether or not that’s true, Harder has said it would be “awesome” if the Gawker …

The Modern Fight For Media Freedom In The United States, Jonathan Peters

Scholarly Works

The First Amendment as a subject is challenging and provocative, and scholarly and popular understandings of it are changing. New communication technologies are pushing lawyers, judges, and scholars to revisit, and sometimes rethink, old legal doctrines and concepts. In the area of privacy, we have to think today about encryption and a website's terms of service. In the area of copyright, we have to think about peer-to-peer file sharing and the licenses granted by iTunes. In the area of sexual expression, we have to think about sexting, revenge porn, and deep fakes.'

This is the emerging state of play for …

The Problem With Free Press Absolutism, Sonja R. West

Scholarly Works

In her important new book, The First Amendment Bubble, Professor Amy Gajda exposes the many dangers of this all-encompassing attitude about constitutional rights for the press. Sure, there may have been a time when the news media could demand- and the courts and public would grant near immunity for their work, making free press absolutism relatively costless. Yet Gajda provides example after example demonstrating that the courts no longer give the media a free pass. And as the public and the courts' opinions about the press change, Gajda warns, the news media's thinking about their legal protections must change as …