Law Commons^™

The Power Of Vulnerability In Promoting A Sense Of Belonging: The Perspective Of A First-Generation American, Karin Mika

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

It is my intention that students teach each other through really getting to know one another and finding commonality in each other’s experiences. Most of us live in a social bubble, partially because we feel vulnerable in worlds where we perceive that we do not belong. By sharing vulnerabilities, we are able to expand our world to not only understand our commonalities, but to get a new view of what we thought was inalterable. By sharing my own experience as an out-sider, I am better able to encourage students to consider more deeply the opinions of others and to learn …

'Fire Away': I Have No Right To Not Be Insulted, David R. Barnhizer

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

Universities are the institutions responsible for advancing our freedom of thought and discourse through the work of independent scholars and the teaching of each generation of students. But for several decades, universities and other educational institutions have increasingly set up rules aimed at protecting individuals and groups from criticism that those individuals and groups consider insensitive, offensive, harassing, intolerant and disrespectful, critical of their core belief systems or threats to their agendas. Even though it has been claimed that disadvantaged interest groups have a right to use one-sided tactics of intolerance against those they consider to be responsible for their …

Why We Need Reed: Unmasking Pretext In Anti-Panhandling Legislation, Joseph Mead

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

Over the past decade, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of areas where asking for help is restricted or banned. Whether called begging, panhandling, or solicitation, cities were spurred on by concerns of business owners and residents to ban or highly restrict this type of speech from occurring in public areas. Yet laws such as these have been repeatedly struck down by courts in recent months, fueled in large part by the Supreme Court’s decision in Reed v. City of Gilbert.

In this essay I argue that, at least in the context of anti-panhandling legislation, Reed …

Privatizing Public Forums To Eliminate Dissent, Kevin F. O'Neill

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

As the 2008 presidential campaign gets underway, the candidates may be tempted to suppress dissent at public forum rallies by using a tactic that Ronald Reagan pioneered and George W. Bush perfected. Under this tactic, the candidate's advance team “privatizes” a public square or public park by securing a municipal permit for the rally date that authorizes the expulsion of any citizen who manifests support for a rival candidate. At a 2004 Bush re-election rally, citizens who held signs opposing the President or opposing the war in Iraq were systematically expelled from a public park by Secret Service agents, who …

Muzzling Death Row Inmates: Applying The First Amendment To Regulations That Restrict A Condemned Prisoner's Last Words, Kevin F. O'Neill

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

This Article asserts that the privilege to deliver a last dying speech— uttered in the presence of, and made audible to, the assembled witnesses in the moments just before one's execution—is a First Amendment right, and that prison policies departing from its traditional exercise are unconstitutional. After canvassing the state prison policies that govern last words, this Article will recount the long historical tradition surrounding their utterance—a history that reveals the extraordinary degree to which Anglo-American governments have honored the privilege.Next, this Article will draw a parallel between the right to utter one's last words and the well-established right of …

An Accelerated History Of Expressive Freedom, Kevin F. O'Neill

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

My purpose in writing this article is to examine the growth of Anglo-American speech rights over the past millennium. Since the best measure of expressive freedom is the freedom to criticize one's government, I will focus on the regulation of seditious speech in an accelerated tour of history, from the printing press to the present day.

A First Amendment Compass: Navigating The Speech Clause With A Five-Step Analytical Framework, Kevin F. O'Neill

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

This Article is designed to serve as a First Amendment “compass,” explaining the Speech Clause while offering a systematic method for analyzing any claim asserted under it. The need for this Article stems from the fact that First Amendment law is more than ever a labyrinth. For students, lawyers, and judges alike, it is difficult even to identify--much less to distinguish and apply-- the various strands of applicable precedent. This is because the Supreme Court has developed a dense mass of overlapping doctrines: drawing distinctions between content-based1 and content-neutral restrictions; drawing further distinctions between fully-protected and “low-level” categories of expression; …

Disentangling The Law Of Public Protest, Kevin F. O'Neill

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

The purpose of this Article is to alleviate the confusion that so frequently surrounds the law of public protest. Much of that confusion can be avoided, when analyzing a given case, by zeroing in on who is regulating the speech in question. There are four regulatory players, who act in four distinct settings: restrictions enacted by legislative bodies, the issuance of permits and fees by government administrators, speech-restrictive injunctions imposed by the judiciary, and the influence of police as a regulatory presence on the street. Discrete lines of precedent attend each of these players. Legislators and judges, for example, are …

Rhetoric, Evidence, And Bar Agency Restrictions On Speech By Attorneys, Lloyd B. Snyder

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

There are two problems with permitting litigation about attorney speech to proceed without requiring bar disciplinary agencies to present empirical data or other evidence to support claims that restrictions on attorney speech are necessary. First, the history of bar association restrictions on attorney speech should make us skeptical that the bar rules are based on lofty ideals about protection of the public. The restrictions began as rules promulgated by elite corporate lawyers whose effect was to limit the activities of their less affluent brethren who were representing criminal defendants and other impoverished clients. The purpose of the rules was to …

The Absoluteness Of The First Amendment, Stephen W. Gard

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

Despite an urgent need, the reality is that today we have no unifying free speech theory. Instead, the recent decisions of the United States Supreme Court suggest that doctrinal confusion reigns. Ironically, I would suggest that the cause of the present doctrinal confusion is not that insufficient attention has been paid to technical free speech issues, but rather that modern first amendment thinking has been dominated by "balancers." The poverty of the balancing approach, be it ad hoc or definitional in character, stems from its reliance on pragmatic considerations rather than on fundamental principles embodied in the enduring legacy of …