Law Commons^™

Machine Speech, Tim Wu

Faculty Scholarship

Computers are making an increasing number of important decisions in our lives. They fly airplanes, navigate traffic, and even recommend books. In the process, computers reason through automated algorithms and constantly send and receive information, sometimes in ways that mimic human expression. When can such communications, called here “algorithmic outputs,” claim First Amendment protection?

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 …

The Leaky Leviathan: Why The Government Condemns And Condones Unlawful Disclosures Of Information, David E. Pozen

Faculty Scholarship

The United States government leaks like a sieve. Presidents denounce the constant flow of classified information to the media from unauthorized, anonymous sources. National security professionals decry the consequences. And yet the laws against leaking are almost never enforced. Throughout U.S. history, roughly a dozen criminal cases have been brought against suspected leakers. There is a dramatic disconnect between the way our laws and our leaders condemn leaking in the abstract and the way they condone it in practice.

This Article challenges the standard account of that disconnect, which emphasizes the difficulties of apprehending and prosecuting offenders, and advances an …