Law Commons^™

Regulating Drones Under The First And Fourth Amendments, Marc Jonathan Blitz, James Grimsley, Stephen E. Henderson, Joseph Thai

William & Mary Law Review

The FAA Modernization and Reform Act of 2012 requires the Federal Aviation Administration to integrate unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones, into the national airspace system by September 2015. Yet perhaps because of their chilling accuracy in targeted killings abroad, perhaps because of an increasing consciousness of diminishing privacy more generally, and perhaps simply because of a fear of the unknown, divergent UAV-restrictive legislation has been proposed in Congress and enacted in a number of states. Given UAV utility and cost-effectiveness over a vast range of tasks, however, widespread commercial use ultimately seems certain. Consequently, it is imperative to understand …

Solving Batson, Tania Tetlow

William & Mary Law Review

The Supreme Court faced an important ideological choice when it banned the racial use of peremptory challenges in Batson v. Kentucky. The Court could either ground the rule in equality rights designed to protect potential jurors from stereotyping, or it could base the rule on the defendant’s Sixth Amendment right to an “impartial jury” drawn from a “fair cross-section of the community.” By choosing the equal protection analysis, the Court turned away from the defendant and the fair functioning of the criminal justice system, and instead focused on protecting potential jurors. In doing so, the Court built a fatal error …

The Derivative Nature Of Corporate Constitutional Rights, Margaret M. Blair, Elizabeth Pollman

William & Mary Law Review

This Article engages the two-hundred-year history of corporate constitutional rights jurisprudence to show that the Supreme Court has long accorded rights to corporations based on the rationale that corporations represent associations of people from whom such rights are derived. The Article draws on the history of business corporations in America to argue that the Court’s characterization of corporations as associations made sense throughout most of the nineteenth century. By the late nineteenth century, however, when the Court was deciding several key cases involving corporate rights, this associational view was already becoming a poor fit for some corporations. The Court’s failure …

Intellectual Property And The Presumption Of Innocence, Irina D. Manta

William & Mary Law Review

Our current methods of imposing criminal convictions on defendants for copyright and trademark infringement are constitutionally defective. Previous works have argued that due process under the Sixth Amendment requires prosecutors to prove every element of a crime beyond a reasonable doubt, including the jurisdictional element. Applying this theory to criminal trademark counterfeiting results in the conclusion that prosecutors should have to demonstrate that an infringing mark needs to have traveled in or affected interstate commerce, which currently is not mandated. Parallel to this construction of the Commerce Clause, criminal prosecutors would also have to prove that Congress has the power …

The Politics And Incentives Of First Amendment Coverage, Frederick Schauer

William & Mary Law Review

No abstract provided.

National Security Information Disclosures And The Role Of Intent, Mary-Rose Papandrea

William & Mary Law Review

In the public discourse, the perceived intent of those who disclose national security information without authorization plays an important role in whether they are labeled as heroes or traitors. Should it matter whether Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning leaked government information to WikiLeaks knowing that our enemies might benefit from the information? Is it relevant that Edward Snowden believed—or that a reasonable person would believe—that the topsecret government surveillance programs he revealed were illegal, or that the public value in knowing about these programs outweighed any risk of harm to national security? This Article examines whether intent—and what kind of intent— …

The First Amendment’S Public Forum, John D. Inazu

William & Mary Law Review

The quintessential city park symbolizes a core feature of a democratic polity: the freedom of all citizens to express their views in public spaces free from the constraints of government imposed orthodoxy. The city park finds an unlikely cousin in the federal tax code’s recognition of deductions for contributions made to charitable, religious, and educational organizations. Together, these three categories of tax-exempt organizations encompass a vast array of groups in civil society.

The city park is a traditional public forum under First Amendment doctrine, and the charitable, educational, and religious deductions under the federal tax code function much like a …

Why Data Privacy Law Is (Mostly) Constitutional, Neil M. Richards

William & Mary Law Review

Laws regulating the collection, use, and disclosure of personal data are (mostly) constitutional, and critics who suggest otherwise are wrong. Since the New Deal, American law has rested on the wise judgment that, by and large, commercial regulation should be made on the basis of economic and social policy, rather than blunt constitutional rules. This has become one of the basic principles of American constitutional law. Although some observers have suggested that the United States Supreme Court’s recent decision in Sorrell v. IMS Health Inc. changes this state of affairs, such readings are incorrect. Sorrell involved a challenge to a …

The Marrow Of Tradition: The Roberts Court And Categorical First Amendment Speech Exclusions, Gregory P. Magarian

William & Mary Law Review

No abstract provided.

Leak Prosecutions And The First Amendment: New Developments And A Closer Look At The Feasibility Of Protecting Leakers, Heidi Kitrosser

William & Mary Law Review

This Article revisits the free speech protections that leakers are due in light of recent commentaries and events. Among other things, the Article critiques arguments to the effect that the Obama Administration’s uptick in leak prosecutions does not threaten the system of free speech because plenty of classified information still makes its way into newspapers and the absolute number of leaker prosecutions remains very low. Such positions overlook the slanted impact that prosecutions and investigations are likely to have—and reportedly have had—on the speech marketplace. The Article also explains that even though the increase in prosecutions and other recent developments, …

Reconciling Privacy And Speech In The Era Of Big Data: A Comparative Legal Analysis, Ronald J. Krotoszynski Jr.

William & Mary Law Review

In both the United States and the nations of Western Europe, significant constitutional commitments safeguard both expressive freedom (including freedom of speech and of the press) and also a generalized constitutional right of privacy. With some regularity, however, these rights will come into conflict, as the protection of one right can be achieved only at the cost of abridging or denying the other. When a government official or public figure objects to the publication of an embarrassing photograph, perhaps taken by an invasive paparazzo, it is simply not possible to fully vindicate both a newspaper’s interest in publishing the photograph …

Internet Exceptionalism: An Overview From General Constitutional Law, Mark Tushnet

William & Mary Law Review

This Article considers First Amendment Internet exceptionalism. I use that term in what I think is a reasonably standard way to refer to the question of whether the technological characteristics of the Internet (and, more generally, twenty-first-century information technologies) justify treating regulation of information dissemination through the Internet differently from regulation of such dissemination through nineteenth- and twentieth-century media, such as print, radio, and television. My aim here is not to provide an answer to that question, but to identify several subquestions whose answers must be part of the larger answer.

First Amendment Expansionism, Leslie Kendrick

William & Mary Law Review

In recent years, many litigants have found the First Amendment to be a useful tool. One could mention pornography actors, tattoo artists, death row inmates, and corporate interests from small photography shops to meat trade associations to cigarette manufacturers to pharmaceutical companies. All have raised First Amendment claims in the last few years, and nearly all of them have met with some level of success.

These claims are examples of what has been called First Amendment opportunism, where litigants raise novel free speech claims that may involve the repackaging of other types of legal arguments. To the extent that many …

New Problems For Subsidized Speech, Joseph Blocher

William & Mary Law Review

The constitutionality of conditional offers from the government is a transsubstantive issue with broad and growing practical implications, but it has always been a particular problem for free speech. Recent developments suggest at least three new approaches to the problem, but no easy solutions to it. The first approach would permit conditions that define the limits of the government spending program, while forbidding conditions that leverage funding so as to regulate speech outside the contours of the program. This is an appealing distinction, but runs into some of the same challenges as public forum analysis. The second approach would treat …

The Right Of Publicity And The First Amendment In The Modern Age Of Commercial Speech, Martin H. Redish, Kelsey B. Shust

William & Mary Law Review

The so-called right of publicity gives individuals a legally protected interest against commercially motivated communicators’ use of their names or likenesses for purposes of commercial gain. Although the right is sometimes viewed as a subcategory of the right of privacy, it may be exercised by the best known celebrities, as well as by the most private individual. It is therefore more properly characterized as a property interest in one’s name and likeness than a protection of one’s privacy.

In order to satisfy the concerns of the First Amendment right of free expression, however, the statutory and common law development of …

The Zombie First Amendment, Julie E. Cohen

William & Mary Law Review

Scholarly and popular critiques of contemporary free speech jurisprudence have noted an attitude of unquestioning deference to the political power of money. Rather than sheltering the ability to speak truth to power, they have lamented, the contemporary First Amendment shelters power’s ability to make and propagate its own truth. This Article relates developments in recent First Amendment jurisprudence to a larger struggle now underway to shape the distribution of information power in the era of informational capitalism. In particular, it argues that cases about political speech—cases that lie at the First Amendment’s traditional core—tell only a small part of the …

When Are Constitutional Rights Non-Absolute? Mccutcheon, Conflicts, And The Sufficiency Question, Mark D. Rosen

William & Mary Law Review

No abstract provided.

Producing Speech, Ashutosh Bhagwat

William & Mary Law Review

In recent years, a large number of disputes have arisen in which parties invoke the First Amendment, but the government action they challenge does not directly regulate “speech,” as in communication. Instead, the government is restricting the creation of communicative materials that are intended to be disseminated in the future—in other words, they restrict producing speech. Examples of such disputes include bans on recording public officials in public places, Los Angeles County’s ban on bareback (condom-less) pornography, restrictions on tattoo parlors, so-called “Ag-Gag” laws forbidding making records of agricultural operations, as well as many others. The question this Article addresses …

The Rhetoric Of Constitutional Absolutism, Eric Berger

William & Mary Law Review

Though constitutional doctrine is famously unpredictable, Supreme Court Justices often imbue their constitutional opinions with a sense of inevitability. Rather than concede that evidence is sometimes equivocal, Justices insist with great certainty that they have divined the correct answer. This Article examines this rhetoric of constitutional absolutism and its place in our broader popular constitutional discourse. After considering examples of the Justices’ rhetorical performances, this Article explores strategic, institutional, and psychological explanations for the phenomenon. It then turns to the rhetoric’s implications, weighing its costs and benefits. This Article ultimately argues that the costs outweigh the benefits and proposes a …

Criminal Innovation And The Warrant Requirement: Reconsidering The Rights-Police Efficiency Trade-Off, Tonja Jacobi, Jonah Kind

William & Mary Law Review

It is routinely assumed that there is a trade-off between police efficiency and the warrant requirement. But existing analysis ignores the interaction between law-enforcement investigative practices and criminal innovation. Narrowing the definition of a search or otherwise limiting the requirement for a warrant gives criminals greater incentive to innovate to avoid detection. With limited resources to develop countermeasures, law enforcement officers will often be just as effective at capturing criminals when facing higher Fourth Amendment hurdles. We provide a game-theoretic model that shows that when law-enforcement investigation and criminal innovation are considered in a dynamic context, the police efficiency rationale …