Law Commons^™

Recognizing The Public Schools' Authority To Discipline Students' Off-Campus Cyberbullying Of Classmates, Douglas E. Abrams

Faculty Publications

The American Medical Association, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have identified bullying in the public elementary and secondary schools as a "public health problem". This article explains the schools' comprehensive authority, consistent with the First Amendment, to impose discipline on cyberbullies, by suspension or expulsion if necessary. Ever since Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District (1969), the Supreme Court's First Amendment decisions have granted the schools authority to discipline student speech that causes, or reasonably threatens, (1) "substantial disruption of or material interference with school …

William H. Sorrell, Attorney General Of Vermont, Et Al. V. Ims Health Inc., Et Al. - Amicus Brief In Support Of Petitioners, Kevin Outterson, David Orentlicher, Christopher T. Robertson, Frank A. Pasquale

Faculty Scholarship

On April 26, 2011, the US Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in the Vermont data mining case, Sorrell v. IMS Health Inc. Respondents claim this is the most important commercial speech case in a decade. Petitioner (the State of Vermont) argues this is the most important medical privacy case since Whalen v. Roe.

The is an amicus brief supporting Vermont, written by law professors and submitted on behalf of the New England Journal of Medicine

Brand Renegades, Jeremy N. Sheff

Faculty Publications

Recent appearances of trademarks in popular culture-in rap lyrics, on reality TV shows, even in youth riots have raised the question whether the owners of those trademarks might pursue legal remedies to protect their brands from unwanted social associations. This Article argues that they cannot, and that we should understand this limitation on trademark rights as grounded in a principle that consumption of certain brands is an expressive act that First Amendment principles place outside trademark owners' control.

Pornography As Pollution, John C. Nagle

Journal Articles

Pornography is often compared to pollution. But little effort has been made to consider what it means to describe pornography as a pollution problem, even as many legal scholars have concluded that the law has failed to control internet pornography. Opponents of pornography maintain passionate convictions about how sexually-explicit materials harm both those who are exposed to them and the broader cultural environment. Viewers of pornography may generally hold less fervent beliefs, but champions of free speech and of a free internet object to anti-pornography regulations with strong convictions of their own. The challenge is how to address the widespread …

The Equal Protection Implications Of Government's Hateful Speech, Helen Norton

Publications

Under what circumstances should we understand government's racist or otherwise hateful speech to violate the Equal Protection Clause? Government speech that communicates hostility or animus on the basis of race, gender, national origin, sexual orientation, or other class status can facilitate private parties' discriminatory behavior, deter its targets from certain important opportunities or activities, and communicate a message of exclusion and second-class status. Contemporary equal protection doctrine, however, does not yet fully address the harms that such government expression potentially poses. The recent emergence of the Court's government speech doctrine--which to date has emphasized the value of government expression without …

Can Speech By Fda-Regulated Firms Ever Be Noncommercial?, Nathan Cortez

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

This Article considers whether speech by pharmaceutical, medical device, and other FDA-regulated companies can ever be noncommercial and thus subject to heightened protection under the First Amendment. Since the U.S. Supreme Court first recognized a right to commercial speech in 1976, there have been 24 published federal judicial opinions in which an FDA-regulated firm has argued that its speech was protected. Courts have categorized the speech as commercial in all but two cases, neither of which involved FDA rules or enforcement.

I examine the tests and factors courts claim they use when making this threshold distinction, then identify the various …