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Full-Text Articles in Law
Is John Stuart Mill's On Liberty Obsolete?, Vincent A. Blasi
Is John Stuart Mill's On Liberty Obsolete?, Vincent A. Blasi
Faculty Scholarship
In On Liberty, published in 1859, John Stuart Mill argues for the “absolute” protection of the “liberty of thought and discussion.” Ever the empiricist, he maintains that such uncompromised freedom, not for all communication or self-expression but for the subset of those activities that qualifies as thought and discussion, would generate the best overall consequences for societies such as Great Britain and the United States. The advent of digital technology has altered how thought and discussion is generated, distributed, and received in ways that might problematize some of the empirical assumptions upon which Mill's argument in On Liberty is …
Courting Censorship, Philip A. Hamburger
Courting Censorship, Philip A. Hamburger
Faculty Scholarship
Has Supreme Court doctrine invited censorship? Not deliberately, of course. Still, it must be asked whether current doctrine has courted censorship — in the same way one might speak of it courting disaster.
The Court has repeatedly declared its devotion to the freedom of speech, so the suggestion that its doctrines have failed to block censorship may seem surprising. The Court’s precedents, however, have left room for government suppression, even to the point of seeming to legitimize it.
This Article is especially critical of the state action doctrine best known from Blum v. Yaretsky. That doctrine mistakenly elevates coercion …
Autonomy And Disciplinarity: Can Pseudoprofessional Speakers Select Their Own Constitutional Categorization?, Joseph Blocher
Autonomy And Disciplinarity: Can Pseudoprofessional Speakers Select Their Own Constitutional Categorization?, Joseph Blocher
Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Education Is Speech: Parental Free Speech In Education, Philip A. Hamburger
Education Is Speech: Parental Free Speech In Education, Philip A. Hamburger
Faculty Scholarship
Education is speech. This simple point is profoundly important. Yet it rarely gets attention in the First Amendment and education scholarship.
Among the implications are those for public schools. All the states require parents to educate their minor children and at the same time offer parents educational support in the form of state schooling. States thereby press parents to take government educational speech in place of their own. Under both the federal and state speech guarantees, states cannot pressure parents, either directly or through conditions, to give up their own educational speech, let alone substitute state educational speech. This abridges …
Protecting Women's Voices: Preventing Retaliatory Defamation Claims In The #Metoo Context, Nicole Ligon
Protecting Women's Voices: Preventing Retaliatory Defamation Claims In The #Metoo Context, Nicole Ligon
Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
The Classic Arguments For Free Speech 1644-1927, Vincent A. Blasi
The Classic Arguments For Free Speech 1644-1927, Vincent A. Blasi
Faculty Scholarship
This chapter examines the classic arguments for freedom of speech. It traces the first comprehensive argument for freedom of speech as a limiting principle of government to John Milton’s Areopagitica, a polemic against censorship by a requirement of prior licensing in which Milton develops an argument for the pursuit of truth through exposure to false and heretical ideas rather than the passive reception of orthodoxy. Despite Milton’s belief in the advancement of understanding through free inquiry, he was far from liberal in the modern sense of that term and he did not, for instance, extend the tolerance he advocated to …
The First Amendment And Algorithms, Stuart M. Benjamin
The First Amendment And Algorithms, Stuart M. Benjamin
Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
"The Road I Can't Help Travelling": Holmes On Truth And Persuadability, Joseph Blocher
"The Road I Can't Help Travelling": Holmes On Truth And Persuadability, Joseph Blocher
Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Holmes's Understanding Of His Clear-And-Present-Danger Test: Why Exactly Did He Require Imminence?, Vincent A. Blasi
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.
Free Speech And Justified True Belief, Joseph Blocher
Free Speech And Justified True Belief, Joseph Blocher
Faculty Scholarship
Law often prioritizes justified true beliefs. Evidence, even if probative and correct, must have a proper foundation. Expert witness testimony must be the product of reliable principles and methods. Prosecutors are not permitted to trick juries into convicting a defendant, even if that defendant is truly guilty. Judges’ reasons, and not just the correctness of their holdings, are the engines of precedent. Lawyers are, in short, familiar with the notion that one must be right for the right reasons.
And yet the standard epistemic theory of the First Amendment—that the marketplace of ideas is the “best test of truth”—has generally …
Who Tells Your Story: The Legality Of And Shift In Racial Preferences Within Casting Practices, Nicole Ligon
Who Tells Your Story: The Legality Of And Shift In Racial Preferences Within Casting Practices, Nicole Ligon
Faculty Scholarship
Expressing racial preferences in casting calls and hiring practices is nothing new. Producers of television shows, movies, and Broadway musicals have regularly and explicitly sought to hire actors and actresses with certain physical characteristics, including race, in casting their productions. And, given that the industry seemingly accepted this standard when it favored white talent, the public heard little about it. To the extent controversy arose, courts quelled concerns in a swift and easy fashion, without consideration of the societal harms or impacts that stereotyped or limited portrayals of minorities in entertainment could have on the public’s perception of people of …
Learned Hand's Seven Other Ideas About The Freedom Of Speech, Vincent A. Blasi
Learned Hand's Seven Other Ideas About The Freedom Of Speech, Vincent A. Blasi
Faculty Scholarship
I say “other” because, regarding the freedom of speech, Learned Hand has suffered the not uncommon fate of having his best ideas either drowned out or credited exclusively to others due to the excessive attention that has been bestowed on one of his lesser ideas. Sitting as a district judge in the case of Masses Publishing Co. v. Patten, Hand wrote the earliest judicial opinion about the freedom of speech that has attained canonical status. He ruled that under the recently passed Espionage Act of 1917, writings critical of government cannot be grounds for imposing criminal punishment or the …
Rights Skepticism And Majority Rule At The Birth Of The Modern First Amendment, Vincent A. Blasi
Rights Skepticism And Majority Rule At The Birth Of The Modern First Amendment, Vincent A. Blasi
Faculty Scholarship
Learned Hand, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Louis Brandeis all had the same problem. They were troubled — Holmes less than the others and later, but eventually — by the widespread and mean-spirited persecution of dissenters they observed as the United States entered World War I and then reacted to the Bolshevik Revolution. Today, most persons so troubled would think that constitutional rights, and particularly the freedom of speech, exist for the very purpose of countermanding zealous political majorities that deny or neglect the claims of dissenters. But Hand, Holmes, and Brandeis, each by his own distinctive path, came to the …
Hate Speech, Public Assurance, And The Civic Standing Of Speakers And Victims, Vincent A. Blasi
Hate Speech, Public Assurance, And The Civic Standing Of Speakers And Victims, Vincent A. Blasi
Faculty Scholarship
Jeremy Waldron and James Weinstein have opened up a promising line of inquiry regarding the legitimacy and propriety of hate speech regulation. In doing so, they have succeeded in reinvigorating a subject that had grown academically formulaic even while becoming alarmingly more salient politically and culturally. Together they have enriched our understanding with their specificity of argumentation, intellectual courage, fairminded attentiveness to critics and counter-arguments, comparative law perspective, and genuine originality of conception. I find that each has shown me at least one significant problem in the other’s analysis, a symmetry that I consider a tribute to both.
Irb Licensing, Philip A. Hamburger
Irb Licensing, Philip A. Hamburger
Faculty Scholarship
This chapter examines conflicting norms in the government's licensing of speech and the press on “human-subjects research” through institutional review boards (IRBs). It begins by discussing licensing and why the prohibition of it is so fundamental and prroceeds by providing an overview of the structure of institutional review board licensing. It then highlights the unconstitutionality of IRB laws, arguing that the use of IRBs violates the principles of academic freedom. It asserts that licensing of speech or the press was a method of controlling the press employed by the Inquisition and the Star Chamber, and the First Amendment unequivocally barred …
New Problems For Subsidized Speech, Joseph Blocher
New Problems For Subsidized Speech, Joseph Blocher
Faculty Scholarship
The constitutionality of conditional offers from the government is a transsubstantive issue with broad and growing practical implications, but it has always been a particular problem for free speech. Recent developments suggest at least three new approaches to the problem, but no easy solutions to it. The first approach would permit conditions that define the limits of the government spending program, while forbidding conditions that leverage funding so as to regulate speech outside the contours of the program. This is an appealing distinction, but runs into some of the same challenges as public forum analysis. The second approach would treat …
Common Sense And Key Questions, Stuart M. Benjamin
Common Sense And Key Questions, Stuart M. Benjamin
Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Hate Speech And The Demos, Jamal Greene
Hate Speech And The Demos, Jamal Greene
Faculty Scholarship
It is sometimes said that the statist and aristocratic traditions of Europe render its political institutions less democratic than those of the United States. Richard Posner writes of “the less democratic cast of European politics, as a result of which elite opinion is more likely to override public opinion than it is in the United States.” If that is true, then there are obvious ways in which it figures into debates over the wisdom of hate-speech regulation. The standard European argument in favor of such regulation may easily be characterized as antidemocratic: Restrictions on hate speech protect unpopular minority groups …
Nonsense And The Freedom Of Speech: What Meaning Means For The First Amendment, Joseph Blocher
Nonsense And The Freedom Of Speech: What Meaning Means For The First Amendment, Joseph Blocher
Faculty Scholarship
A great deal of everyday expression is, strictly speaking, nonsense. But courts and scholars have done little to consider whether or why such meaningless speech, like nonrepresentational art, falls within “the freedom of speech.” If, as many suggest, meaning is what separates speech from sound and expression from conduct, then the constitutional case for nonsense is complicated. And because nonsense is so common, the case is also important — artists like Lewis Carroll and Jackson Pollock are not the only putative “speakers” who should be concerned about the outcome.
This Article is the first to explore thoroughly the relationship between …
Implementing First Amendment Institutionalism, Joseph Blocher
Implementing First Amendment Institutionalism, Joseph Blocher
Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Algorithms And Speech, Stuart M. Benjamin
Algorithms And Speech, Stuart M. Benjamin
Faculty Scholarship
One of the central questions in free speech jurisprudence is what activities the First Amendment encompasses. This Article considers that question in the context of an area of increasing importance – algorithm-based decisions. I begin by looking to broadly accepted legal sources, which for the First Amendment means primarily Supreme Court jurisprudence. That jurisprudence provides for very broad First Amendment coverage, and the Court has reinforced that breadth in recent cases. Under the Court’s jurisprudence the First Amendment (and the heightened scrutiny it entails) would apply to many algorithm-based decisions, specifically those entailing substantive communications. We could of course adopt …
Analogies And Institutions In The First And Second Amendments: A Response To Professor Magarian, Darrell A.H. Miller
Analogies And Institutions In The First And Second Amendments: A Response To Professor Magarian, Darrell A.H. Miller
Faculty Scholarship
In this essay, Professor Darrell Miller responds to Professor Gregory Magarian's criticism of the manner in which judges, advocates, and scholars have used the First Amendment to frame Second Amendment interpretive questions.
First Amendment Protection For Union Appeals To Consumers, Michael C. Harper
First Amendment Protection For Union Appeals To Consumers, Michael C. Harper
Faculty Scholarship
This article explains why decisions of the National Labor Relations Board under President Obama holding non-picketing secondary appeals to consumers not to be illegal under the National Labor Relations Act were necessary under a 1988 decision of the Supreme Court, Edward J. DeBartolo Corp. v. Florida Gulf Coast Building & Construction Trades Council. The article also explains why both the Supreme Court decision and the Board’s recent decisions were compelled by the first amendment and could not be based on the language of § 8(b)(4)(ii)(B) of the National Labor Relations Act as interpreted by the Court in other cases. The …
Aiming At The Wrong Target: The "Audience Targeting" Test For Personal Jurisdiction In Internet Defamation Cases, Sarah H. Ludington
Aiming At The Wrong Target: The "Audience Targeting" Test For Personal Jurisdiction In Internet Defamation Cases, Sarah H. Ludington
Faculty Scholarship
In Young v. New Haven Advocate, 315 F.3d 256 (4th Cir. 2002), the Fourth Circuit crafted a jurisdictional test for Internet defamation that requires the plaintiff to show that the defendant specifically targeted an audience in the forum state for the state to exercise jurisdiction. This test relies on the presumption that the Internet — which is accessible everywhere — is targeted nowhere; it strongly protects foreign libel defendants who have published on the Internet from being sued outside of their home states. Other courts, including the North Carolina Court of Appeals, have since adopted or applied the test. The …
Talking Chalk: Defacing The First Amendment In The Public Forum, Marie Failinger
Talking Chalk: Defacing The First Amendment In The Public Forum, Marie Failinger
Faculty Scholarship
This article examines the surprising outcomes of cases challenging arrests of protesters for chalking sidewalks in public forums, and argues that courts have been careless in analyzing these blanket prohibitions under the time, place and manner doctrine.
Sorrell V. Ims Health And The End Of The Constitutional Double Standard, Ernest A. Young
Sorrell V. Ims Health And The End Of The Constitutional Double Standard, Ernest A. Young
Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Second Things First: What Free Speech Can And Can’T Say About Guns, Joseph Blocher
Second Things First: What Free Speech Can And Can’T Say About Guns, Joseph Blocher
Faculty Scholarship
Professor Blocher responds to Gregory Magarian’s article on the implications of the First Amendment for the Second.
Democratic Participation And The Freedom Of Speech: A Response To Post And Weinstein Responses, Vincent A. Blasi
Democratic Participation And The Freedom Of Speech: A Response To Post And Weinstein Responses, Vincent A. Blasi
Faculty Scholarship
I think it is useful to search for a theory that has as one of its justifications its superior fit with either the case law or the fundamental commitments and shared understandings of the political community, preferably with both. So even if someone were to convince me that she has in hand a normatively superior theory of free speech, whether grounded in the commitment to democracy or otherwise, I would still be interested in what Professors Post and Weinstein are trying to do.
Seana Shiffrin's Thinker-Based Freedom Of Speech: A Response, Vincent A. Blasi
Seana Shiffrin's Thinker-Based Freedom Of Speech: A Response, Vincent A. Blasi
Faculty Scholarship
As an instinctive consequentialist so far as First Amendment theory is concerned, I have to admit that I have never been so tempted by a non-consequentialist account as I am by what Professor Shiffrin has produced. My principal interest is the history of ideas regarding the freedom of speech. I have long been struck by how so many of the canonical writers on the subject have built their arguments from the starting point of the central importance of the freedom of thought. This is true of Milton and Mill in a basic, explicit, straightforward way (if Milton can ever be …
The Dogs That Did Not Bark: The Silence Of The Legal Academy During World War Ii, Sarah H. Ludington
The Dogs That Did Not Bark: The Silence Of The Legal Academy During World War Ii, Sarah H. Ludington
Faculty Scholarship
During World War II, the legal academy was virtually uncritical of the government’s conduct of the war, despite some obvious domestic abuses of civil rights, such as the internment of Japanese-Americans. This silence has largely been ignored in the literature about the history of legal education. This Article argues that there are many strands of causation for this silence. On an obvious level, World War II was a popular war fought against a fascist threat, and left-leaning academics generally supported the war. On a less obvious level, law school enrollment plummeted during the war, and the numbers of full-time law …