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Full-Text Articles in Law

Content Moderation As Surveillance, Hannah Bloch-Wehba Oct 2022

Content Moderation As Surveillance, Hannah Bloch-Wehba

Faculty Scholarship

Technology platforms are the new governments, and content moderation is the new law, or so goes a common refrain. As platforms increasingly turn toward new, automated mechanisms of enforcing their rules, the apparent power of the private sector seems only to grow. Yet beneath the surface lies a web of complex relationships between public and private authorities that call into question whether platforms truly possess such unilateral power. Law enforcement and police are exerting influence over platform content rules, giving governments a louder voice in supposedly “private” decisions. At the same time, law enforcement avails itself of the affordances of …


Columbia Law Experts Submit Two Briefs To Supreme Court In Free Speech/Lgb Rights Case, Law, Rights, And Religion Project Aug 2022

Columbia Law Experts Submit Two Briefs To Supreme Court In Free Speech/Lgb Rights Case, Law, Rights, And Religion Project

Center for Gender & Sexuality Law

Columbia Law School faculty and policy teams submitted amicus briefs to the Supreme Court on Friday in 303 Creative v. Elenis, a case the Court will decide next term.


The Power Of Vulnerability In Promoting A Sense Of Belonging: The Perspective Of A First-Generation American, Karin Mika Aug 2022

The Power Of Vulnerability In Promoting A Sense Of Belonging: The Perspective Of A First-Generation American, Karin Mika

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

It is my intention that students teach each other through really getting to know one another and finding commonality in each other’s experiences. Most of us live in a social bubble, partially because we feel vulnerable in worlds where we perceive that we do not belong. By sharing vulnerabilities, we are able to expand our world to not only understand our commonalities, but to get a new view of what we thought was inalterable. By sharing my own experience as an out-sider, I am better able to encourage students to consider more deeply the opinions of others and to learn …


Anti-Speech Acts And The First Amendment, Richard K. Sherwin Jul 2022

Anti-Speech Acts And The First Amendment, Richard K. Sherwin

Articles & Chapters

In many states today, there are laws on the books designed to protect the legitimacy and fairness of elections by barring the knowing or reckless dissemination of demonstrably false statements. Regulating this kind of deliberate deception protects the public against the erosion of First Amendment freedoms – such as the freedom to think and express one’s own thoughts and to meaningfully deliberate in an electoral process free from deliberate efforts to flood the zone of public discourse with confusion and mistrust based on deliberate and provable falsehoods. Some of these regulations, however, have been successfully challenged on First Amendment grounds. …


Free Speech On Social Media: Unrestricted Or Regulated?, Alessandra Garcia Guevara Apr 2022

Free Speech On Social Media: Unrestricted Or Regulated?, Alessandra Garcia Guevara

Student Writing

Social media has evolved into an essential mode of communication in recent years, allowing people to express their thoughts with the audience of their choice by sending private messages, posting their thoughts, or sharing their opinions. Such audiences can come from all over the world because this online technology breaks down geographic, linguistic, and cultural barriers. As a result, social media has evolved into a powerful tool for self-expression, allowing anyone with an Internet connection to participate in global debates. However, its misuse has had disastrous consequences in the real world, such as the attack on the Capitol that occurred …


Aba Model Rule 8.4(G), Discriminatory Speech, And The First Amendment, Bruce Green, Rebecca Roiphe Apr 2022

Aba Model Rule 8.4(G), Discriminatory Speech, And The First Amendment, Bruce Green, Rebecca Roiphe

Articles & Chapters

The ABA adopted Model Rule 8.4(g), which targets certain speech and conduct that are based on “race, sex, religion, national origin, ethnicity, disability, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status or socioeconomic status.” In particular, according to the accompanying comment, Rule 8.4(g) reaches speech that is “derogatory and demeaning” or that “manifests bias or prejudice towards others” and is “harmful” (including, presumably, emotionally harmful). This rule targets a significant amount of speech that would be constitutionally protected if it were uttered by a nonlawyer. This article argues that there is no justification for treating lawyers differently from others in many …


Manipulation And The First Amendment, Helen Norton Jan 2022

Manipulation And The First Amendment, Helen Norton

Publications

No abstract provided.


Distrust, Negative First Amendment Theory, And The Regulation Of Lies, Helen Norton Jan 2022

Distrust, Negative First Amendment Theory, And The Regulation Of Lies, Helen Norton

Publications

This symposium essay explores the relationship between “negative” First Amendment theory—rooted in distrust of the government’s potential for regulatory abuse—and the government’s regulation of lies. Negative First Amendment theory explains why many lies are protected from governmental regulation—even when the regulation neither punishes nor chills valuable speech (as was the case, for example, of the statute at issue in United States v. Alvarez). But negative theory, like any theory, also needs limiting principles that explain when the government’s regulation is constitutionally justifiable.

In my view, we engage in the principled application of negative theory when we invoke it in (the …


Calls For Change: Seeing Cancel Culture From A Multi-Level Perspective, Tomar Pierson-Brown Jan 2022

Calls For Change: Seeing Cancel Culture From A Multi-Level Perspective, Tomar Pierson-Brown

Articles

Transition Design offers a framework and employs an array of tools to engage with complexity. “Cancel culture” is a complex phenomenon that presents an opportunity for administrators in higher education to draw from the Transition Design approach in framing and responding to this trend. Faculty accused of or caught using racist, sexist, or homophobic speech are increasingly met with calls to lose their positions, titles, or other professional opportunities. Such calls for cancellation arise from discreet social networks organized around an identified lack of accountability for social transgressions carried out in the professional school environment. Much of the existing discourse …