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Full-Text Articles in Law
Of Systems Thinking And Straw Men, Kate Klonick
Of Systems Thinking And Straw Men, Kate Klonick
Faculty Publications
(Excerpt)
In Content Moderation as Systems Thinking, Professor Evelyn Douek, as the title suggests, endorses an approach to the people, rules, and processes governing online speech as one not of anecdote and doctrine but of systems thinking. She constructs this concept as a novel and superior understanding of the problems of online-speech governance as compared to those existent in what she calls the “standard [scholarly] picture of content moderation.” This standard picture of content moderation — which is roughly five years old — is “outdated and incomplete,” she argues. It is preoccupied with anecdotal, high-profile adjudications in which platforms …
Mysterizing Religion, Marc O. Degirolami
Mysterizing Religion, Marc O. Degirolami
Faculty Publications
(Excerpt)
A mystery of faith is a truth of religion that escapes human understanding. The mysteries of religion are not truths that human beings happen not to know, or truths that they could know with sufficient study and application, but instead truths that they cannot know in the nature of things. In the Letter to the Colossians, St. Paul writes that as a Christian apostle, his holy office is to “bring to completion for you the word of God, the mystery hidden from ages and from generations past.” Note that Paul does not say that his task is to make …
Establishment’S Political Priority To Free Exercise, Marc O. Degirolami
Establishment’S Political Priority To Free Exercise, Marc O. Degirolami
Faculty Publications
Americans are beset by disagreement about the First Amendment. Progressive scholars are attacking the venerable liberal view that First Amendment rights must not be constricted to secure communal, political benefits. To prioritize free speech rights, they say, reflects an unjust inflation of individual interest over our common political commitments. These disagreements afflict the Religion Clauses as well. Critics claim that religious exemption has become more important than the values of disestablishment that define the polity. Free exercise exemption, they argue, has subordinated establishment.
This Article contests these views. The fundamental rules and norms constituting the political regime—what the Article calls …
First Amendment Traditionalism, Marc O. Degirolami
First Amendment Traditionalism, Marc O. Degirolami
Faculty Publications
Traditionalist constitutional interpretation takes political and cultural practices of long age and duration as constituting the presumptive meaning of the text. This Essay probes traditionalism's conceptual and normative foundations. It focuses on the Supreme Court's traditionalist interpretation of the First Amendment to understand the distinctive justifications for traditionalism and the relationship between traditionalism and originalism. The first part of the Essay identifies and describes traditionalism in some of the Court's Speech and Religion Clause jurisprudence, highlighting its salience in the Court's recent Establishment Clause doctrine.
Part II develops two justfications for traditionalism: "interpretive" and "democratic-populist." The interpretive justification is that …
The New Governors: The People, Rules And Processes Governing Online Speech, Kate Klonick
The New Governors: The People, Rules And Processes Governing Online Speech, Kate Klonick
Faculty Publications
Private online platforms have an increasingly essential role in free speech and participation in democratic culture. But while it might appear that any internet user can publish freely and instantly online, many platforms actively curate the content posted by their users. How and why these platforms operate to moderate speech is largely opaque.
This Article provides the first analysis of what these platforms are actually doing to moderate online speech under a regulatory and First Amendment framework. Drawing from original interviews, archived materials, and internal documents, this Article describes how three major online platforms — Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube — …
Expanding The Schoolhouse Gate: Public Schools (K-12) And The Regulation Of Cyberbullying, Philip Lee
Expanding The Schoolhouse Gate: Public Schools (K-12) And The Regulation Of Cyberbullying, Philip Lee
Faculty Publications
(Excerpt)
In a tragic case that received international attention, 15-year-old Phoebe Prince killed herself after being bullied—both physically and online—by some of her classmates. Phoebe had moved to Massachusetts from a small town in Ireland, enrolling as a freshman at South Hadley High School. After a brief relationship with a popular boy in the senior class, the taunting by her classmates began. Some students called her an “Irish slut” and a “whore,” knocked things out of her hands, and sent her threatening texts. Some of the students used Facebook and Twitter to speak badly about her. Phoebe suffered this treatment …
A Contract Theory Of Academic Freedom, Philip Lee
A Contract Theory Of Academic Freedom, Philip Lee
Faculty Publications
(Excerpt)
Academic freedom is central to the core role of professors in a free society. Yet, current First Amendment protections exist to protect academic institutions, not the academics themselves. For example, in Urofsky v. Gilmore, six professors employed by various public colleges and universities in Virginia challenged a law restricting state employees from accessing sexually explicit material on computers owned or leased by the state. The professors claimed, in part, that such a restriction was in violation of their First Amendment academic freedom rights to conduct scholarly research. The Fourth Circuit upheld the law and noted that “to the …
Seeking Guidance? New Legal Challenges To 'Legislative Prayer', Marc O. Degirolami
Seeking Guidance? New Legal Challenges To 'Legislative Prayer', Marc O. Degirolami
Faculty Publications
(Excerpt)
It has long been the tradition of American citizens to pray for divine blessing and guidance in their civic business. This tradition, which predates the founding of the American Republic, finds expression at all levels of government, federal, state, and local. It was embraced by the First Continental Congress, the same Congress that both employed a paid chaplain and later drafted the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution; it was maintained during the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment; and it persists in various guises to this day.