Law Commons^™

Legal Scholars & Theologians Partner On An Ambitious Vision For Religious Liberty, Elizabeth Reiner Platt

Center for Gender & Sexuality Law

Oct. 6, 2020—To safeguard the right to religious freedom, the next presidential administration must end the hyper-surveillance of Muslims, welcome religious refugees, protect land sacred to Native communities, restore church-state separation, and withdraw policies that favor particular religious beliefs, argues a new report co-authored by the Law, Rights, and Religion Project at Columbia University (LRRP) and Auburn Seminary.

Federal Court Allows Civil Rights Lawsuit Challenging Violations At Standing Rock, Columbia Center For Contemporary Critical Thought

Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought

New York, September 3, 2020 — In a significant victory for critics of governmental overreach, Judge Daniel M. Traynor (U.S. District Court for North Dakota) denied motions to dismiss filed by state and county law enforcement defendants and the private security firm, TigerSwan LLC. As a result, the Thunderhawk v. County of Morton civil rights lawsuit, brought by plaintiffs Cissy Thunderhawk, Wašté Win Young, the Reverend John Floberg, and José Zhagñay against North Dakota government officials and TigerSwan, will move forward on the claim that the plaintiffs and the class were denied their constitutional rights to Free Speech.

Why A Data Disclosure Law Is (Likely) Unconstitutional, Max I. Fiest

Kernochan Center for Law, Media, and the Arts

Social media platforms have changed the very structure of communication. These platforms exert significant influence over how we get our news, how we form and join political movements, and how we connect with friends and family. But social media platforms are black boxes. Moderation algorithms are opaque--even to the platforms themselves — and attempts by third parties to research these algorithms are often frustrated. Because platforms withhold data necessary for public interest research, Congress might step in and mandate data access for certain researchers and journalists. I conclude that any such effort would (likely) be unconstitutional under the First Amendment. …

Fixing America's Founding, Maeve Glass

Faculty Scholarship

The forty-fifth presidency of the United States has sent lawyers reaching once more for the Founders’ dictionaries and legal treatises. In courtrooms, law schools, and media outlets across the country, the original meanings of the words etched into the U.S. Constitution in 1787 have become the staging ground for debates ranging from the power of a president to trademark his name in China to the rights of a legal permanent resident facing deportation. And yet, in this age when big data promises to solve potential challenges of interpretation and judges have for the most part agreed that original meaning should …

Disinformation In The Marketplace Of Ideas, Tim Wu

Faculty Scholarship

It was just one line, nearly a throwaway; technically a subordinate clause. Yet that one clause from Oliver Wendell Holmes’s Abrams dissent breathed life into a metaphor, the “marketplace of ideas,” whose lasting power is undeniable. Nor is it difficult to understand why. Yes, it may be incomplete, inaccurate, and possibly cribbed from John Stuart Mill, but the metaphor matches something we all see. Ideas and ideological programs are out there looking for adherents or “buyers.” In Holmes’s time, progressives, socialists, and fascists courted supporters, just as similar groups do now. Specific ideas like the flat tax or the legalization …

Holmes's Understanding Of His Clear-And-Present-Danger Test: Why Exactly Did He Require Imminence?, Vincent A. Blasi

Faculty Scholarship

For all the suggestiveness and staying power of his market-in-ideas metaphor, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’s most significant influence on First Amendment law has turned out to be his notion that only imminent harm can justify punishment for expressions of opinion. This emphasis on the time dimension in the calculus of harm is now entrenched in modern doctrine. It is easy to imagine how First Amendment law might have developed differently had Holmes’s peculiar focus on imminence not been a factor in shaping how the freedom of speech has come to be understood in the United States.

Antitrust & Corruption: Overruling Noerr, Tim Wu

Faculty Scholarship

We live in a time when concerns about influence over the American political process by powerful private interests have reached an apogee, both on the left and the right. Among the laws originally intended to fight excessive private influence over republican institutions were the antitrust laws, whose sponsors were concerned not just with monopoly, but also its influence over legislatures and politicians. While no one would claim that the antitrust laws were meant to be comprehensive anti-corruption laws, there can be little question that they were passed with concerns about the political influence of powerful firms and industry cartels.

Since …