First Amendment Commons^™

Fool Me Once: Regulating "Fake News" And Other Online Advertising, Abby Wood, Ann M. Ravel, Irina Dykhne

University of Southern California Legal Studies Working Paper Series

A lack of transparency for online political advertising has long been a problem in American political campaigns. Disinformation attacks that American voters have experienced since the 2016 campaign have made the need for regulatory action more pressing.

Disinformation on social media sometimes takes the form of “fake news”. Fake news is not news, it is native political advertising. Campaign advertising on social media – regardless of veracity – allows campaigns and outside groups to activate a narrow slice of the electorate with micro-targeted appeals. An ad can activate one’s bias or spread disinformation and never be seen again. The group running ...

National Security Letters And Intelligence Oversight, Michael J. Greenlee

Michael Greenlee

The history of NSL [national security letter] powers can serve as an illuminating example of the post­-Church Committee development of intelligence investigations. Many of the Church Committee findings and recommendations concerning the need for expanded oversight to prevent the executive branch from violating or ignoring the law, excessively using intrusive investigation techniques, and conducting overbroad investigations with inadequate controls on the retention and dissemi­nation of the information gathered are all reflected in the development of NSL powers and authorities from their creation in 1978 through passage of the PlRA [USA PATRIOT Improvement and Reauthorization Act] in 2006. At ...

Maine's "Act To Protect Traditional Marriage And Prohibit Same-Sex Marriages": Questions Of Constitutionality Under State And Federal Law, Jennifer B. Wriggins

Maine Law Review

In 1997, Maine's Legislature passed “An Act to Protect Traditional Marriage and Prohibit Same-Sex Marriages” (Act). The summary attached to the bill states that the bill “prohibits persons of the same sex from contracting marriage.” The bill was the verbatim text of an initiative petition. Civil marriage in Maine and other states is regulated by state statute, and marriage regulation is generally considered to be within the state's police power. However, the state's power to regulate marriage is subject to constitutional limitations. I maintain that “heightened scrutiny” should be applied to the Act because the Act creates ...

Counterspeech, Cosby, And Libel Law: Some Lessons About “Pure Opinion” & Resuscitating The Self-Defense Privilege, Clay Calvert

Florida Law Review

Using the recent federal district court opinions in Hill v. Cosby and Green v. Cosby as analytical springboards, this timely Article explores problems with the concept of pure opinion in libel law. Specifically, Hill and Green pivoted on the same allegedly defamatory statement attorney Martin Singer made on behalf of comedian Bill Cosby, yet the judges involved reached opposite conclusions regarding whether it was protected as pure opinion. Furthermore, this Article analyzes notions of counterspeech and the conditional self-defense privilege in libel law in arguing for shielding Singer’s statement from liability. Although the self- defense privilege was flatly rejected ...

Who Watches This Stuff?: Videos Depicting Actual Murder And The Need For A Federal Criminal Murder-Video Statute, Musa K. Farmand Jr.

Florida Law Review

Murder videos are video recordings that depict the intentional, unlawful killing of one human being by another. Generally, due to their obscene nature, murder videos are absent from mainstream media. However, in the wake of Vester Lee Flanagan II's filmed murders of reporter Allison Parker and cameraman Adam Ward on live television, it is perhaps only a matter of time before murder videos become an acceptable form of entertainment. Further, Americans should be wary of potential "copycat" perpetrators and their thirst for infamy via immortalization on the Internet, as the free dissemination of murder videos provide extra incentive to ...

Who Watches This Stuff?: Videos Depicting Actual Murder And The Need For A Federal Criminal Murder-Video Statute, Musa K. Farmand Jr.

Florida Law Review

Murder videos are video recordings that depict the intentional, unlawful killing of one human being by another. Generally, due to their obscene nature, murder videos are absent from mainstream media. However, in the wake of Vester Lee Flanagan II's filmed murders of reporter Allison Parker and cameraman Adam Ward on live television, it is perhaps only a matter of time before murder videos become an acceptable form of entertainment. Further, Americans should be wary of potential "copycat" perpetrators and their thirst for infamy via immortalization on the Internet, as the free dissemination of murder videos provide extra incentive to ...

Never On Sunday: Workplace Religious Freedom In The New Millennium, Marianne C. Delpo

Maine Law Review

Imagine being fired for refusing to sing Happy Birthday. Now imagine collecting $53,000 for that firing--from a waitressing job. Science fiction? Not exactly. Try religious discrimination in the workplace--1990s style. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 has long proscribed such treatment, but lawsuits claiming this type of workplace discrimination were relatively rare for many years. Now claims are on the rise, up 18% over the past five years, and the substance of religious discrimination claims is changing to include some unprecedented fact patterns. This new activity in employment discrimination law, as well as the growing likelihood ...

When Should Rights "Trump"? An Examination Of Speech And Property, Laura S. Underkuffler

Maine Law Review

In his well-known article, Property, Speech, and the Politics of Distrust, Professor Richard Epstein—a leading contemporary voice in the fields of property theory and constitutional law—makes a simple but compelling argument. There has been, he argues, a mistake in “the dominant mode of thinking about property rights during the past fifty years [that] has been ... of constitutional dimensions.” This mistake, in Professor Epstein's view, is the refusal of the federal courts to accord to individual property rights the same kind of protection from government regulation that is accorded to other constitutional rights. Using free speech as his ...

The Maine Civil Rights Act: History, Enforcement, Application, And Analysis, J. Christopher Parr

Maine Law Review

Since the passage of the “Maine Civil Rights Act” (MCRA, Act) in 1989, the Maine Department of the Attorney General has made enforcement of that civil “hate crime” law one of its highest priorities. According to one statistic, “more than 125 people have been prosecuted in Maine's civil courts on hate crime charges since 1994,” and only two of those actions have been lost by the State. The Attorney General at the time of this writing, Andrew Ketterer, has stated that he takes the perpetration of hate crimes seriously, and that it has been important to him “that the ...

Where The Right Went Wrong In Southworth: Underestimating The Power Of The Marketplace, Clay Calvery

Maine Law Review

When the United States Supreme Court unanimously declared in March 2000 that mandatory student activity fees at public universities do not offend the First Amendment if distributed in viewpoint-neutral fashion, the decision dealt a severe blow to the conservative movement that had both supported the challenge to fee assessments and long railed against a perceived leftist/liberal bias in higher education. The New York Times, acknowledging the political implications of the case, hailed the Court's decision in Board of Regents v. Southworth as “a surprisingly broad and decisive victory for universities on an ideologically charged issue that has roiled ...

Life In No Trump: Property And Speech Under The Constitution, Richard A. Esptein

Maine Law Review

The editors of the Maine Law Review have been kind enough to offer me the opportunity to respond to Laura Underkuffler's criticism of my work in her recent Godfrey Lecture, “When Should Rights ‘Trump’? An Examination of Speech and Property,” which appears in the preceding issue. In my earlier writings on constitutional law, more specifically, in my paper, Property, Speech and the Politics of Distrust, I took the position that modern Supreme Court jurisprudence had taken a turn for the worse insofar as it used different standards of review in passing on the constitutionality of legislation. The current position ...

Hate Speech - The United States Versus The Rest Of The World?, Kevin Boyle

Maine Law Review

The search for a commonly agreed upon international legal understanding of the meaning of free speech or freedom of expression, as an individual human right, was a major international preoccupation from the 1940s to the 1980s. During the Cold War it was, of course, also a highly ideological debate. There were three positions, broadly speaking: the Soviet Union and its allies, who had little enthusiasm for the idea at all; the United States, which believed in it—many thought—too much; and the rest, the other Western democracies and developing countries, who tried to hold the middle ground. These contrasting ...

“Frankly Unthinkable”: The Constitutional Failings Of President Trump’S Proposed Muslim Registry, A. Reid Monroe-Sheridan

Maine Law Review

On several occasions during the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump endorsed the creation of a mandatory government registry for Muslims in the United States— not just visitors from abroad, but American citizens as well. This astonishing proposal has received little attention in legal scholarship to date, even though Trump has refused to renounce the idea following his election to the presidency. In this Article, I attempt to address President Trump’ s proposal in several ways. First, I aim to provide a thorough analysis demonstrating unequivocally that such a “ Muslim registry,” with the characteristics President Trump has endorsed, would violate the ...

Religion Lessons From Europe: Intolerant Secularism, Pluralistic Neutrality, And The U.S. Supreme Court, Antony Barone Kolenc

Pace International Law Review

Case law from the European Court of Human Rights demonstrates to the U.S. Supreme Court how a pluralistic neutrality principle can enrich the American society and harness the value of faith in the public sphere, while at the same time retaining the vigorous protection of individual religious rights. The unfortunate alternative to a jurisprudence built around pluralistic neutrality is the inevitability of intolerant secularism—an increasingly militant separation of religious ideals from the public life, leading ultimately to a repressive society that has no room in its government for religious citizens. The results of intolerant secularism are seen in ...

Going To The Clerk’S Office And We’Re Not Going To Get Married, Alicia F. Blanchard

University of Massachusetts Law Review

Same-sex marriage is a controversial topic subject to great debate. The Supreme Court in 2015 federally recognized the legality of same-sex marriages in Obergefell v. Hodges. Despite this ruling, some people looked for any reason to denounce the holding. Perhaps none were more vocal than those who rejected same-sex marriage on the basis of their religious tenets. Miller v. Davis provided people who were morally opposed to same-sex marriage a platform to support their concerns grounded in a First Amendment right to freedom of religion. The question is how far does one’s freedom of religion extend? Does freedom of ...

Brief Of Amici Curiae Corporate Law Professors In Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd. V. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, Harold Kent Greenfield, Daniel A. Rubens

Kent Greenfield

Professor Greenfield was the principal author of an amicus brief on behalf of 33 corporate law professors in Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, argued in December 2017. The brief argues that shareholders’ religious and political beliefs should not be projected onto a corporation for purposes of First Amendment accommodation.

Reconciling Agency Fee Doctrine, The First Amendment, And The Modern Public Sector Union, Courtlyn G. Roser-Jones

Northwestern University Law Review

Few institutions have done more to improve working conditions for the middle class than labor unions. Their efforts, of course, cost money. To fund union activities, thousands of collective bargaining agreements across the nation have long included provisions permitting employers to require employees to pay “fair share” or “agency” fees. In public unions—when the employer is the government—this arrangement creates tension between two important values: the First Amendment’s protection against compelled expression and the collective benefits of worker representation. When confronted with this tension forty years ago in Abood v. Detroit Board of Education, the Supreme Court ...

Deference And Prisoner Accommodations Post-Holt: Moving Rluipa Toward "Strict In Theory, Strict In Fact", Barrick Bollman

Northwestern University Law Review

The Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA) requires prisons to make accommodations to regulations that substantially burden a prisoner’s religious exercise, unless the prison can show that the regulation is the least restrictive means to meeting a compelling interest. This language suggests strict scrutiny, and yet in Cutter v. Wilkinson, the Supreme Court instead intimated in dicta that courts should give prison officials “due deference” when applying this test. The 2015 case of Holt v. Hobbs presented the Court with an opportunity to clarify how much deference is due under RLUIPA. Though Holt declared that there should ...

A Muslim Registry: The Precursor To Internment?, Sahar F. Aziz

Sahar F. Aziz

Antislapp Darrenchaker.Pdf, Darren Chaker

Darren Chaker