Law Commons^™

The Meaning Of Wrongdoing - A Crime Of Disrespecting The Flag: Grounds For Preserving National Unity, Mohammed Saif-Alden Wattad

San Diego International Law Journal

To conclude on this issue, the rights of others, as individuals and as a whole, are formulated as the social protected interest that criminal law seeks to protect through criminal means, and it is with these rights that criminal law theory should be concerned in the first level of scrutiny. However, in the second level of scrutiny, an additional set of rights are brought into play; these are the rights of the individual, namely the actor, to exercise their constitutional rights e.g., free speech, liberty, free exercise of religion. The second level of scrutiny requires balancing those rights with the …

The Resilient Foundation Of Democracy: The Legal Deconstruction Of The Washington Posts's Condemnation Of Edward Snowden, Hanna Kim

Indiana Law Journal

On September 17, 2016, The Washington Post (“the Post”) made history by being the first paper to ever call for the criminal prosecution of its own source —Edward Snowden. Yet, two years prior to this editorial, the Post accepted the 2014 Pulitzer Prize in Public Service for its “revelation of widespread secret surveillance by the National Security Agency”—an honor which would not have been bestowed had Snowden not leaked the documents through this news outlet. The other three major media outlets that received and published Snowden’s documents and findings—The Guardian, The New York Times, and The Intercept—all have taken the …

Rfra As Legislative Entrenchment, Branden Lewiston

Pepperdine Law Review

When there is a conflict between two federal statutes, the more recent statute overrides the past statute. However, courts have used the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) to preempt federal laws passed after it. Normally that is the role of constitutional provisions, not statutes. RFRA has been subject to much constitutional criticism, but its attempt to control subsequent federal law has drawn little attention. Courts use RFRA to trump subsequent federal statutes without second thought. This Essay draws on legislative entrenchment doctrine to argue that this feature of RFRA is unconstitutional. RFRA should be used to strike down prior laws …

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, roughly …

Favoring The Press, Sonja R. West

Scholarly Works

In the 2010 case of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the United States Supreme Court caught the nation’s attention by declaring that corporations have a First Amendment right to independently spend unlimited amounts of money in political campaigns. The Court rested its 5-4 decision in large part on a concept of speaker-based discrimination. In the Court’s words, “the Government may commit a constitutional wrong when by law it identifies certain preferred speakers.”

To drive home its point that speaker-based distinctions are inherently problematic, the Court focused on one type of speaker distinction — the treatment of news media corporations. …

Suing The President For First Amendment Violations, Sonja R. West

Scholarly Works

On any given day, it seems, President Donald Trump can be found attacking, threatening, or punishing the press and other individuals whose speech he dislikes. His actions, moreover, inevitably raise the question: Do any of these individuals or organizations (or any future ones) have a viable claim against the President for violating their First Amendment rights?

One might think that the ability to sue the President for violation of the First Amendment would be relatively settled. The answer, however, is not quite that straightforward. Due to several unique qualities about the First Amendment and the presidency, it is not entirely …

Free Speech And Generally Applicable Laws: A New Doctrinal Synthesis, Dan T. Coenen

Scholarly Works

A longstanding mystery of constitutional law concerns how the Free Speech Clause interacts with “generally applicable” legal restrictions. This Article develops a new conceptual framework for working through this puzzle. It does so by extracting from prior Supreme Court rulings an approach that divides these restrictions into three separate categories, each of which (at least presumptively) brings into play a different level of judicial scrutiny. An example of the first and most closely scrutinized category of generally applicable laws—that is, laws that place a “direct in effect” burden on speech—is provided by breach-of-the-peace statutes. These laws are generally applicable because …

Privacy's Double Standards, Scott Skinner-Thompson

Publications

Where the right to privacy exists, it should be available to all people. If not universally available, then privacy rights should be particularly accessible to marginalized individuals who are subject to greater surveillance and are less able to absorb the social costs of privacy violations. But in practice, there is evidence that people of privilege tend to fare better when they bring privacy tort claims than do non-privileged individuals. This disparity occurs despite doctrine suggesting that those who occupy prominent and public social positions are entitled to diminished privacy tort protections.

This Article unearths disparate outcomes in public disclosure tort …

Presidential Attacks On The Press, Sonja R. West

Scholarly Works

President Donald Trump’s habit of hurling invectives at the press is disturbing. It undermines the work of the press and breaks long-standing norms that presidents show respect for the role of the Fourth Estate. But insults alone rarely raise First Amendment issues. Presidents have long used the bully pulpit to respond to or criticize news reports. Even Trump’s near daily verbal assaults on reporters and news organizations can be considered part of our country’s “uninhibited, robust, and wide-open” marketplace of ideas. Presidents have opinions too, and journalists should be able to handle his rants.

Yet there are also times when …

The Search For An Egalitarian First Amendment, Jeremy K. Kessler, David E. Pozen

Faculty Scholarship

Over the past decade, the Roberts Court has handed down a series of rulings that demonstrate the degree to which the First Amendment can be used to thwart economic and social welfare regulation – generating widespread accusations that the Court has created a "new Lochner." This introduction to the Columbia Law Review's Symposium on Free Expression in an Age of Inequality takes up three questions raised by these developments: Why has First Amendment law become such a prominent site for struggles over socioeconomic inequality? Does the First Amendment tradition contain egalitarian elements that could be recovered? And what might a …

Beyond The Bosses' Constitution: The First Amendment And Class Entrenchment, Jedediah S. Purdy

Faculty Scholarship

The Supreme Court’s “weaponized” First Amendment has been its strongest antiregulatory tool in recent decades, slashing campaign-finance regulation, public-sector union financing, and pharmaceutical regulation, and threatening a broader remit. Along with others, I have previously criticized these developments as a “new Lochnerism.” In this Essay, part of a Columbia Law Review Symposium, I press beyond these criticisms to diagnose the ideological outlook of these opinions and to propose an alternative. The leading decisions of the antiregulatory First Amendment often associate free speech with a vision of market efficiency; but, I argue, closer to their heart is antistatist fear of entrenchment …

Hate Speech At Home And Abroad, Sarah H. Cleveland

Faculty Scholarship

The United States’ best-known constitutional protection internationally is surely the First Amendment. Around the world, the United States is perceived as protecting freedom of expression and the press first and foremost, among all rights. And whether admired for its purity and idealism or dismissed as naïve and sui generis, the United States’ approach to free speech is globally examined, critiqued, and debated. It is the United States’ most prominent constitutional export, informing the drafting of foreign constitutions, statutes, and judicial interpretations, and undergirding the protection for freedom of expression in the international and regional human rights systems.

This chapter …