Law Commons^™

Speech Regulation And Tobacco Harm Reduction, Jonathan Adler, Jacob James Rich

Faculty Publications

Regulation of commercial speech is a major component of federal regulation of tobacco products. Since adoption of federal tobacco legislation, the Food and Drug Administration has asserted regulatory authority over ENDS and other vaping products as “tobacco products,” subjecting them to the same regulatory regime as traditional tobacco products even though such projects appear to pose less of a threat to public health. Such regulation, and the restriction on truthful speech in particular, may be having negative consequences for public health. Barring producers from informing consumers about the relative risks of vaping products and their potential to reduce smoking eliminates …

History's Speech Acts, Jessie Hill

Faculty Publications

This Essay considers the historic relationship between symbolic public expressions of racial and religious identity—in particular, Confederate symbols and Christian religious displays. These displays sometimes comprise shared symbology, and the adoption of this symbology overlaps at distinct moments in U.S. history in which Confederate and Christian symbolism converged to express messages of combined religious and racial superiority. This Essay argues that these forms of expression can best be understood as “speech acts” that seek to construct a particular social reality, often in defiance of political and social fact. They thus not only express but also enact social hierarchies. It further …

Political Advertising In Virtual Reality, Scott P. Bloomberg

Faculty Publications

This Article is about how biometric data collected through VR technologies will greatly exacerbate existing problems with political ad microtargeting. Commercially available VR devices can—and in some cases, must—be integrated with sensors that track users’ eyes, faces, hands, and bodies. Political campaigns will be able to leverage this data to target ads with extraordinary precision. Indeed, targeting ads with biometric data may well be the next step in the evolution of microtargeted political messaging—a practice that has contributed to a rise in disinformation, filter-bubbles, and privacy invasions. If this sounds like science fiction, it is closer than you may think. …

Of Systems Thinking And Straw Men, Kate Klonick

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

In Content Moderation as Systems Thinking, Professor Evelyn Douek, as the title suggests, endorses an approach to the people, rules, and processes governing online speech as one not of anecdote and doctrine but of systems thinking. She constructs this concept as a novel and superior understanding of the problems of online-speech governance as compared to those existent in what she calls the “standard [scholarly] picture of content moderation.” This standard picture of content moderation — which is roughly five years old — is “outdated and incomplete,” she argues. It is preoccupied with anecdotal, high-profile adjudications in which platforms …

Mysterizing Religion, Marc O. Degirolami

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

A mystery of faith is a truth of religion that escapes human understanding. The mysteries of religion are not truths that human beings happen not to know, or truths that they could know with sufficient study and application, but instead truths that they cannot know in the nature of things. In the Letter to the Colossians, St. Paul writes that as a Christian apostle, his holy office is to “bring to completion for you the word of God, the mystery hidden from ages and from generations past.” Note that Paul does not say that his task is to make …