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To Accommodate Or Not To Accommodate: (When) Should The State Regulate Religion To Protect The Rights Of Children And Third Parties?, Hillel Y. Levin, Allan J. Jacobs, Kavita Arora
To Accommodate Or Not To Accommodate: (When) Should The State Regulate Religion To Protect The Rights Of Children And Third Parties?, Hillel Y. Levin, Allan J. Jacobs, Kavita Arora
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When should we accommodate religious practices? When should we demand that religious groups instead conform to social and legal norms? Who should make these decisions, and how? These questions lie at the very heart of our contemporary debates in the field of Law and Religion.
Particularly thorny issues arise where religious practices may impose health-related harm to children within a religious group or to third parties. Unfortunately, legislators, scholars, courts, ethicists, and medical practitioners have not offered a consistent way to analyze such cases and the law is inconsistent. This Article suggests that the lack of consistency is a troubling …
The 'Press,' Then & Now, Sonja R. West
The 'Press,' Then & Now, Sonja R. West
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Does the First Amendment’s protection of freedom of “the press” simply mean that we all have the right to use mass communication technology to disseminate our speech? Or does it provide constitutional safeguards for a particular group of speakers who function as government watchdogs and citizen surrogates? This question defines the current debate over the Press Clause. The Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, along with recent work by Michael McConnell and Eugene Volokh, suggests the answer is the former. This article pushes back on that view.
It starts by expanding the scope of the relevant historical evidence. Discussions about the …
The Problem With Free Press Absolutism, Sonja R. West
The Problem With Free Press Absolutism, Sonja R. West
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In her important new book, The First Amendment Bubble, Professor Amy Gajda exposes the many dangers of this all-encompassing attitude about constitutional rights for the press. Sure, there may have been a time when the news media could demand- and the courts and public would grant near immunity for their work, making free press absolutism relatively costless. Yet Gajda provides example after example demonstrating that the courts no longer give the media a free pass. And as the public and the courts' opinions about the press change, Gajda warns, the news media's thinking about their legal protections must change as …
The Media Exemption Puzzle Of Campaign Finance Laws, Sonja R. West
The Media Exemption Puzzle Of Campaign Finance Laws, Sonja R. West
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In the 2010 case of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the United States Supreme Court solidified the media exemption dilemma in campaign finance law. When attempting to address concerns about corporate campaign expenditures (i.e., corporate political speech), legislatures are now stuck between a rock and a hard place. Regulate media corporations, and they violate press freedoms. Exempt media corporations from the regulations, however, and they are accused of speaker discrimination.
Thus the question of how to treat the press in campaign finance law can no longer be ignored. Can legislatures, without running afoul of the First Amendment, ever regulate …