Law Commons^™

Out Of Thin Air: Using First Amendment Public Forum Analysis To Redeem American Broadcasting Regulation, Anthony E. Varona

Articles

American television and radio broadcasters are uniquely privileged among Federal Communications Commission (FCC) licensees. Exalted as public trustees by the 1934 Communications Act, broadcasters pay virtually nothing for the use of their channels of public radiofrequency spectrum, unlike many other FCC licensees who have paid billions of dollars for similar digital spectrum. Congress envisioned a social contract of sorts between broadcast licensees and the communities they served. In exchange for their free licenses, broadcast stations were charged with providing a platform for a "free marketplace of ideas" that would cultivate a democratically engaged and enlightened citizenry through the broadcasting of …

Nineteenth-Century Free Exercise Jurisprudence And The Challenge Of Polygamy: The Relevance Of Nineteenth-Century Cases And Commentaries For Contemporary Debates About Free Exercise Exemptions, Clark B. Lombardi

Articles

Does the Free Exercise Clause of the U.S. Constitution require judges to exempt religious objectors from the application of nondiscriminatory and otherwise applicable laws? Over the last twenty years, judges and academics have debated fiercely whether the Clause should be interpreted to provide religiously observant citizens with a right to “free exercise exemptions.” The debate has led indirectly to a new interest in nineteenth-century views on free exercise jurisprudence. In this Article, I will examine the scholarship on nineteenth-century free exercise jurisprudence to date and ask what it adds to our understanding of the Clause and the question of exemptions.

Relative Access To Corrective Speech: A New Test For Requiring Actual Malice, Aaron Perzanowski

Articles

This Article reexamines the First Amendment protections provided by the public figure doctrine. It suggests that the doctrine is rooted in a set of out-dated assumptions regarding the media landscape and, as a result, has failed to adapt in a manner that accounts for our changing communications environment.

The public figure doctrine, which imposes the more rigorous actual malice standard of fault on defamation plaintiffs who enjoy greater access to mass media, was constructed in an era defined by one-to-many communications media. Newspapers, broadcasters, and traditional publishers exhausted the Court's understanding of the means of communicating with mass audiences. As …