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Full-Text Articles in Law

Barring Immoral Speech In Patent And Copyright, Ned Snow Jan 2021

Barring Immoral Speech In Patent And Copyright, Ned Snow

SMU Law Review

In the past three years, the Supreme Court has twice ruled that Congress’s moral bars to trademark protection violate the First Amendment. Those rulings raise a simple question in other areas of intellectual property. Does the First Amendment preclude Congress from denying patent or copyright protection based on a moral reason? Congress, for instance, might deny patent protection for inventions directed toward the consumption of marijuana. Inventors would accordingly choose not to disclose knowledge about those inventions to the public, and the denial would chill their speech. Similarly, Congress would chill speech if it denied copyright protection for moral reasons. …


Inciting, Requesting, Provoking, Or Persuading Others To Commit Crimes: The Legacy Of Schenck And Abrams In Free Speech Jurisprudence, Larry Alexander Jan 2019

Inciting, Requesting, Provoking, Or Persuading Others To Commit Crimes: The Legacy Of Schenck And Abrams In Free Speech Jurisprudence, Larry Alexander

SMU Law Review

No abstract provided.


“And The Truth Shall Make You Free”: Schenck, Abrams, And A Hundred Years Of History, Rodney A. Smolla Jan 2019

“And The Truth Shall Make You Free”: Schenck, Abrams, And A Hundred Years Of History, Rodney A. Smolla

SMU Law Review

No abstract provided.


Global Platform Governance: Private Power In The Shadow Of The State, Hannah Bloch-Wehba Jan 2019

Global Platform Governance: Private Power In The Shadow Of The State, Hannah Bloch-Wehba

SMU Law Review

Online intermediaries—search engines, social media platforms, even e-commerce businesses—are increasingly required to make critical decisions about free expression, individual privacy, and property rights under domestic law. These requirements arise in contexts that include the right to be forgotten, hate speech,“ terrorist” speech, and copyright and intellectual property. At the same time, these disputes about online speech are increasingly borderless. Many laws targeting online speech and privacy are explicitly extraterritorial in scope. Even when not, some courts have ruled that they have jurisdiction to enforce compliance on a global scale. And governments are also demanding that platforms remove content—on a global …


The Lessons Of 1919, Lackland H. Bloom Jan 2019

The Lessons Of 1919, Lackland H. Bloom

SMU Law Review

One hundred years ago, the Supreme Court embarked on its first serious consideration of the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of speech. In 1919, the Court upheld four federal criminal convictions over First Amendment defenses. Three of the majority opinions were written by Justice Holmes. In the fourth, he offered a classic dissent. Two of the cases, Frohwerk v. United States and Debs v. United States, are of middling significance. The other two, Schenck v. United States and Abrams v. United States, are iconic. From these cases have sprung an expansive and complex jurisprudence of free speech. The …


Falsity And The First Amendment, G. Edward White Jan 2019

Falsity And The First Amendment, G. Edward White

SMU Law Review

This Article considers the extent to which the exclusion of forms of speech from the coverage of the First Amendment has turned on the falsity of statements within the excluded categories. It does so, first, by reviewing the Supreme Court’s early and mid-twentieth century free speech decisions, to demonstrate that none of the principal cases in which the Court swept a particular category of expression within the First Amendment’s coverage involved speech that was false; and, second, by suggesting that when the Court first announced that some “breathing space” was required for factually inaccurate statements about public officials or private …


Speech And Exercise By Private Individuals And Organizations, Kent Greenawalt Jan 2019

Speech And Exercise By Private Individuals And Organizations, Kent Greenawalt

SMU Law Review

No abstract provided.


Dissent In A Crowded Theater, Mari J. Matsuda Jan 2019

Dissent In A Crowded Theater, Mari J. Matsuda

SMU Law Review

No abstract provided.


Born In Dissent: Free Speech And Gay Rights, Dale Carpenter Jan 2019

Born In Dissent: Free Speech And Gay Rights, Dale Carpenter

SMU Law Review

It is no stretch to say that Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes created the modern First Amendment a hundred years ago in his opinions in Schenck and Abrams. It is equally true that the First Amendment created gay America. For advocates of gay legal and social equality, there has been no more reliable and important constitutional text. The freedoms it guarantees protected gay cultural and political institutions from state regulation designed to impose a contrary vision of the good life. Gay organizations, clubs, bars, politicians, journals, newspapers, radio programs, television shows, web sites—all of these—would have been swept away in …


Originalist Reflections On Constitutional Freedom Of Speech, Christopher Wolfe Jan 2019

Originalist Reflections On Constitutional Freedom Of Speech, Christopher Wolfe

SMU Law Review

In this brief Article, I would like to offer some reflections on the First Amendment freedom of speech and press guarantee from an originalist perspective. This area seems to me to be one that is particularly difficult for originalists, and I think that there is insufficient acknowledgment of that fact among them.


First Amendment Electronic Speech: Ex Parte Reece, A Missed Opportunity To Narrow Texas’S Unconstitutionally Overbroad Anti-Harassment Statute, Brian Long Jan 2018

First Amendment Electronic Speech: Ex Parte Reece, A Missed Opportunity To Narrow Texas’S Unconstitutionally Overbroad Anti-Harassment Statute, Brian Long

SMU Law Review

No abstract provided.


Free Speech, The Search For Truth, And The Problem Of Collective Knowledge, Frederick Schauer Jan 2017

Free Speech, The Search For Truth, And The Problem Of Collective Knowledge, Frederick Schauer

SMU Law Review

No abstract provided.


First Amendment Commercial Speech—Swipe Fees Mute Texas Merchants, Shelby T. Perry Jan 2017

First Amendment Commercial Speech—Swipe Fees Mute Texas Merchants, Shelby T. Perry

SMU Law Review

No abstract provided.