Law Commons^™

Keynote Address, Justin Hansford

Seattle University Law Review

Keynote Address by Justin Hansford

Government Tweets, Government Speech: The First Amendment Implications Of Government Trolling, Douglas B. Mckechnie

Seattle University Law Review

President Trump has been accused of using @realDonaldTrump to troll his critics. While the President’s tweets are often attributed to his personal views, they raise important Constitutional questions. This article posits that @realDonaldTrump tweets are government speech and, where they troll government critics, they violate the Free Speech Clause. I begin the article with an exploration of President Trump’s use of @realDonaldTrump from his time as a private citizen to President. The article then chronicles the development of the government speech doctrine and the Supreme Court’s factors that differentiate private speech from government speech. I argue that, based on the …

"Inciting A Riot": Silent Sentinels, Group Protests, And Prisoners' Petition And Associational Rights, Nicole B. Godfrey

Seattle University Law Review

This Article argues for increased legal protections for prisoners who choose to engage in group protest to shed light on the conditions of their incarceration. A companion piece to a similar article that focused on prisoner free speech rights, this Article uses the acts of protest utilized by the Silent Sentinels to examine why prisoners’ rights to petition and association should be strengthened. By strengthening these rights, the Article argues that we will advance the values enshrined by the First Amendment’s Petition Clause while simultaneously advancing the rights of the incarcerated millions with little to no political power.

The Article …

Roulette V. City Of Seattle: A City Lives With Its Homeless, William M. Berg

Seattle University Law Review

This Note analyzes the Roulette holding with respect to prior decisions on begging and vagrancy. In addition, this Note discusses the sidewalk ordinance with respect to the efforts of other communities to control the detrimental effects of a growing homeless population. This Note concludes that the Roulette holding strikes a constitutionally valid doctrinal and jurisprudential middle ground between abandoning the streets to the homeless and driving them from the community. It is argued that the sidewalk ordinance is normatively valid, in that it sets a reasonable standard of conduct that meets commonly accepted norms of civility, serving to benefit the …