Law Commons^™

Can Moving Pictures Speak? Silent Film, Free Speech, And Social Science In Early 20th Century Law, Jennifer Petersen

Studio for Law and Culture

When the Supreme Court was first confronted with a First Amendment case involving film, it was confronted with a difficult and fascinating question: were silent films speech? The decision in the case, Mutual v. Ohio (1915), famously answered no. The decision is usually understood to be part of a tradition of interpretations of the First Amendment as applying primarily to political opinion; in this reading, film was not protected because it was entertainment and/or commerce. However, Mutual also contains a set of arguments about the nature of film as more akin to action than to speech — arguments embedded in …

Viewpoints From Olympus, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

This Essay examines the Supreme Court's treatment of content and viewpoint discrimination in Rosenberger v. Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia. In that opinion, the Court adopted a very expansive approach to what constitutes viewpoint discrimination, the form of content discrimination most disfavored by the Constitution. The Court held that a public university could not decline to fund publication of Wide Awake, a magazine devoted to proselytizing for Christianity, if it funded other student publications. Justice Kennedy's opinion for the Court accepted the argument of the sponsors of Wide Awake that the University had engaged in …

Free Speech In The United States And Canada, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

This comparison of freedom of speech in the United States and Canada concentrates on Supreme Court decisions in the two countries and on kinds of speech mainly engaged in by extreme dissenters and political outsiders. After brief comments about constitutional language and general approaches, I discuss subversive speech and other speech that encourages criminal acts, hate speech, symbolic speech, and public demonstrations.

In both countries, a major premise of modern adjudication is that freedom of expression is a central feature of liberal democracy. Government "by the people," even in the extended sense of government by representatives, requires that citizens openly …