Law Commons^™

Hate Speech On Social Media, Amos N. Guiora, Elizabeth Park

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

This essay expounds on Raphael Cohen-Almagor’s recent book, Confronting the Internet’s Dark Side, Moral and Social Responsibility on the Free Highway, and advocates placing narrow limitations on hate speech posted to social media websites. The Internet is a limitless platform for information and data sharing. It is, in addition, however, a low-cost, high-speed dissemination mechanism that facilitates the spreading of hate speech including violent and virtual threats. Indictment and prosecution for social media posts that transgress from opinion to inciteful hate speech are appropriate in limited circumstances. This article uses various real-world examples to explore when limitations on Internet-based hate …

Enemy Construction And The Press, Ronnell Anderson Jones, Lisa Grow Sun

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

When the president of the United States declared recently that the press is “the enemy,” it set off a firestorm of criticism from defenders of the institutional media and champions of the press’s role in the democracy. But even these Trump critics have mostly failed to appreciate the wider ramifications of the president’s narrative choice. Our earlier work describes the process of governmental “enemy construction,” by which officials use war rhetoric and other signaling behaviors to convey that a person or institution is not merely an institution that, although wholly legitimate, has engaged in behaviors that are disappointing or disapproved, …

Justice Scalia And Fourth Estate Skepticism, Ronnell Anderson Jones

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

The about-face in characterization of the press during Justice Scalia's three decades on the Court is worthy of a discussion about its underlying causes and also a discussion about its potential effects. As I have noted elsewhere, both the explanations for the shift and the possible ramifications of it are complex and multifaceted. Scalia's push for a new, less positive depiction of the press came at a time when the institutional press experienced significant change and its reputation among the American public plummeted-suggesting that Justice Scalia (and, ultimately, his colleagues on the Court) were merely being perceptive observers of the …

Sex, Drugs, And Eagle Feathers: An Empirical Study Of Federal Religious Freedom Cases, Luke W. Goodrich

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

This Article presents one of the first empirical studies of federal religious freedom cases since the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Hobby Lobby. Critics of Hobby Lobby predicted that it would open the floodgates to a host of novel claims, transforming “religious freedom” from a shield for protecting religious minorities into a sword for imposing Christian values in the areas of abortion, contraception, and gay rights.

Our study finds that this prediction is unsupported. Instead, we find that religious freedom cases remain scarce. Successful cases are even scarcer. Religious minorities remain significantly overrepresented in religious freedom cases; Christians remain significantly …