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Full-Text Articles in Law
#I U: Considering The Context Of Online Threats, Lyrissa Lidsky
#I U: Considering The Context Of Online Threats, Lyrissa Lidsky
Faculty Publications
The United States Supreme Court has failed to grapple with the unique interpretive difficulties presented by social media threats cases. Social media make hateful and threatening speech more common but also magnify the potential for a speaker's innocent words to be misunderstood People speak differently on different social media platforms, and architecturalf eatures ofplatforms, such as character limits, affect the meaning of speech. The same is true of other contextual clues unique to social media, such as gifs, hashtags, and emojis. Only by understanding social media contexts can legal decision-makers avoid overcriminalization of speech protected by the First Amendment. This …
Free Speech Hypocrisy: Campus Free Speech Conflicts And The Sub-Legal First Amendment, Christina E. Wells
Free Speech Hypocrisy: Campus Free Speech Conflicts And The Sub-Legal First Amendment, Christina E. Wells
Faculty Publications
This Article is modest in scope. It seeks primarily to illuminate the role of free speech conflicts, especially those involving contentious speech, within the Court's jurisprudence, and to illustrate how arguments characterizing the protestors' speech as censorship misperceive the important role such conflicts play. Using both the Court's doctrinal framework and conflict resolution literature, this article attempts to bring deeper understanding to the purposes for the Court's approach, the context underlying the current conflicts, and the flaws underlying the argument that the protestors' actions are censorial. Part I briefly reviews three illustrative free speech conflicts at the University of Missouri, …