Supreme Court of the United States Commons^™

The Original Meaning Of "God": Using The Language Of The Framing Generation To Create A Coherent Establishment Clause Jurisprudence, Michael I. Meyerson

All Faculty Scholarship

The Supreme Court’s attempt to create a standard for evaluating whether the Establishment Clause is violated by religious governmental speech, such as the public display of the Ten Commandments or the Pledge of Allegiance, is a total failure. The Court’s Establishment Clause jurisprudence has been termed “convoluted,” “a muddled mess,” and “a polite lie.” Unwilling to either allow all governmental religious speech or ban it entirely, the Court is in need of a coherent standard for distinguishing the permissible from the unconstitutional. Thus far, no Justice has offered such a standard.

A careful reading of the history of the framing …

"Friending" Students On Social Media, Charles J. Russo

Educational Leadership Faculty Publications

The use of social media, particularly services such as Facebook and Twitter, has grown exponentially in recent years. Yet to date, relatively little litigation has arisen around the issue of teachers and other educators engaging in questionable or inappropriate use of social media when communicating with students. Even so, parental complaints do arise when teachers share inappropriate communications with students through social media. Consequently, as social networking continues to increase, school business officials and other education leaders should devise policies to help deal with this growing trend.

Given the widespread use of social media, this column examines emerging legal questions …

Outing Privacy, Scott Skinner-Thompson

Publications

The government regularly outs information concerning people's sexuality, gender identity, and HIV status. Notwithstanding the implications of such outings, the Supreme Court has yet to resolve whether the Constitution contains a right to informational privacy - a right to limit the government's ability to collect and disseminate personal information.

This Article probes informational privacy theory and jurisprudence to better understand the judiciary's reluctance to fully embrace a constitutional right to informational privacy. The Article argues that while existing scholarly theories of informational privacy encourage us to broadly imagine the right and its possibilities, often focusing on informational privacy's ability to …

Commentary: Exploiting Mixed Speech, Caroline Mala Corbin

Articles

The Supreme Court has been taking advantage of mixed speech—that is, speech that is both private and governmental—to characterize challenged speech in a way that ultimately permits the government to sponsor Christian speech. In Pleasant Grove City v. Summum, a free speech case where the government accepted a Christian Ten Commandments monument but rejected a Summum Seven Aphorisms monument, the Court held that privately donated monuments displayed in public parks were government speech as opposed to private speech and therefore not subject to free speech limits on viewpoint discrimination. In Town of Greece v. Galloway, an establishment case …

How Do We Know When Speech Is Of Low Value?, Helen Norton

Publications

No abstract provided.

Constitutional Contraction: Religion And The Roberts Court, Marc O. Degirolami

Scholarly Articles

This Article argues that the most salient feature to emerge in the first decade of the Roberts Court's law and religion jurisprudence is the contraction of the constitutional law of religious freedom. It illustrates that contraction in three ways.

First, contraction of judicial review. Only once has the Roberts Court exercised the power of judicial review to strike down federal, state, or local legislation, policies, or practices on the ground that they violate the Free Exercise or Establishment Clauses. In this constitutional context the Court has been nearly uniformly deferential to government laws and policies. That distinguishes it from its …

Corporate Religious Liberty, Caroline Mala Corbin

Articles

No abstract provided.

Beyond The Fourth Amendment: Additional Constitutional Guarantees That Mass Surveillance Violates, Nadine Strossen

Articles & Chapters

The ongoing dragnet communications surveillance programs raise multiple statutory and constitutional problems. Each problem alone, and even more so the whole combination, provides a serious ground at least for vastly curbing such programs, if not ending them. This Article reviews constitutional challenges to these programs to evaluate the likely success of current and future litigants.