Law Commons^™

Legal Scholars & Theologians Partner On An Ambitious Vision For Religious Liberty, Elizabeth Reiner Platt

Center for Gender & Sexuality Law

Oct. 6, 2020—To safeguard the right to religious freedom, the next presidential administration must end the hyper-surveillance of Muslims, welcome religious refugees, protect land sacred to Native communities, restore church-state separation, and withdraw policies that favor particular religious beliefs, argues a new report co-authored by the Law, Rights, and Religion Project at Columbia University (LRRP) and Auburn Seminary.

Antitrust & Corruption: Overruling Noerr, Tim Wu

Faculty Scholarship

We live in a time when concerns about influence over the American political process by powerful private interests have reached an apogee, both on the left and the right. Among the laws originally intended to fight excessive private influence over republican institutions were the antitrust laws, whose sponsors were concerned not just with monopoly, but also its influence over legislatures and politicians. While no one would claim that the antitrust laws were meant to be comprehensive anti-corruption laws, there can be little question that they were passed with concerns about the political influence of powerful firms and industry cartels.

Since …

A Skeptical View Of Information Fiduciaries, Lina M. Khan, David E. Pozen

Faculty Scholarship

The concept of “information fiduciaries” has surged to the forefront of debates on online-platform regulation. Developed by Professor Jack Balkin, the concept is meant to rebalance the relationship between ordinary individuals and the digital companies that accumulate, analyze, and sell their personal data for profit. Just as the law imposes special duties of care, confidentiality, and loyalty on doctors, lawyers, and accountants vis-à-vis their patients and clients, Balkin argues, so too should it impose special duties on corporations such as Facebook, Google, and Twitter vis-à-vis their end users. Over the past several years, this argument has garnered remarkably broad support …

Transparency's Ideological Drift, David E. Pozen

Faculty Scholarship

In the formative periods of American "open government" law, the idea of transparency was linked with progressive politics. Advocates of transparency understood themselves to be promoting values such as bureaucratic rationality, social justice, and trust in public institutions. Transparency was meant to make government stronger and more egalitarian. In the twenty-first century, transparency is doing different work. Although a wide range of actors appeal to transparency in a wide range of contexts, the dominant strain in the policy discourse emphasizes its capacity to check administrative abuse, enhance private choice, and reduce other forms of regulation. Transparency is meant to make …

Beyond The Bosses' Constitution: The First Amendment And Class Entrenchment, Jedediah S. Purdy

Faculty Scholarship

The Supreme Court’s “weaponized” First Amendment has been its strongest antiregulatory tool in recent decades, slashing campaign-finance regulation, public-sector union financing, and pharmaceutical regulation, and threatening a broader remit. Along with others, I have previously criticized these developments as a “new Lochnerism.” In this Essay, part of a Columbia Law Review Symposium, I press beyond these criticisms to diagnose the ideological outlook of these opinions and to propose an alternative. The leading decisions of the antiregulatory First Amendment often associate free speech with a vision of market efficiency; but, I argue, closer to their heart is antistatist fear of entrenchment …

Church, State & The Trump Administration, Public Rights/Private Conscience Project

Center for Gender & Sexuality Law

President Donald Trump has repeatedly pledged to be a staunch defender of religious liberties. Nevertheless, his campaign promises, as well as statements made by him and his cabinet appointees, suggest that Trump holds a limited and deeply flawed understanding of religious freedom, among other constitutional rights and guarantees. While members of the new administration will act quickly and aggressively to advance certain conservative Christian religious tenets by limiting the rights of LGBTQ communities and curtailing access to reproductive health care, the President has promised to significantly restrain the rights of religious minorities by imposing a Muslim immigration ban, increase profiling …

Trump And Cabinet Nominees Seek To Restrict Muslim Rights, Break Down The Wall Between Church And State, Public Rights/Private Conscience Project

Center for Gender & Sexuality Law

A new document issued by the Public Rights/Private Conscience Project (PRPCP) at Columbia Law School outlines the numerous areas in which the Trump administration will seek to advance particular conservative Christian tenets, restrict the rights of religious minorities, and break down the barrier between church and state. Enactment of the administration’s policy priorities would call into question the careful balance that currently exists between the First Amendment and other fundamental rights guaranteed under the Constitution. The report, entitled Church, State & the Trump Administration, highlights the ways in which the new administration’s early executive actions and cabinet nominations, as …

The Early Years Of First Amendment Lochnerism, Jeremy K. Kessler

Faculty Scholarship

From Citizens United to Hobby Lobby, civil libertarian challenges to the regulation of economic activity are increasingly prevalent. Critics of this trend invoke the specter of Lochner v. New York. They suggest that the First Amendment, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and other legislative "conscience clauses" are being used to resurrect the economically libertarian substantive due process jurisprudence of the early twentieth century. Yet the worry that aggressive judicial enforcement of the First Amendment might erode democratic regulation of the economy and enhance the economic power of private actors has a long history. As this Article demonstrates, anxieties …

Irb Licensing, Philip A. Hamburger

Faculty Scholarship

This chapter examines conflicting norms in the government's licensing of speech and the press on “human-subjects research” through institutional review boards (IRBs). It begins by discussing licensing and why the prohibition of it is so fundamental and prroceeds by providing an overview of the structure of institutional review board licensing. It then highlights the unconstitutionality of IRB laws, arguing that the use of IRBs violates the principles of academic freedom. It asserts that licensing of speech or the press was a method of controlling the press employed by the Inquisition and the Star Chamber, and the First Amendment unequivocally barred …

Supreme Court Amicus Brief Of 19 Corporate Law Professors, Friedrichs V. California Teachers Association, No. 14-915, John C. Coates, Iv, Lucian A. Bebchuk, Bernard S. Black, John C. Coffee Jr., James D. Cox, Ronald J. Gilson, Jeffrey N. Gordon, Lawrence A. Hamermesh, Henry Hansmann, Robert J. Jackson Jr., Marcel Kahan, Vikramaditya S. Khanna, Michael Klausner, Reinier Kraakman, Donald C. Langevoort, Edward B. Rock, Mark J. Roe, Helen S. Scott

Faculty Scholarship

The Supreme Court has looked to the rights of corporate shareholders in determining the rights of union members and non-members to control political spending, and vice versa. The Court sometimes assumes that if shareholders disapprove of corporate political expression, they can easily sell their shares or exercise control over corporate spending. This assumption is mistaken. Because of how capital is saved and invested, most individual shareholders cannot obtain full information about corporate political activities, even after the fact, nor can they prevent their savings from being used to speak in ways with which they disagree. Individual shareholders have no “opt …

The Administrative Origins Of Modern Civil Liberties Law, Jeremy K. Kessler

Faculty Scholarship

This Article offers a new explanation for the puzzling origin of modern civil liberties law. Legal scholars have long sought to explain how Progressive lawyers and intellectuals skeptical of individual rights and committed to a strong, activist state came to advocate for robust First Amendment protections after World War I. Most attempts to solve this puzzle focus on the executive branch's suppression of dissent during World War I and the Red Scare. Once Progressives realized that a powerful administrative state risked stifling debate and deliberation within civil society, the story goes, they turned to civil liberties law in order to …

Machine Speech, Tim Wu

Faculty Scholarship

Computers are making an increasing number of important decisions in our lives. They fly airplanes, navigate traffic, and even recommend books. In the process, computers reason through automated algorithms and constantly send and receive information, sometimes in ways that mimic human expression. When can such communications, called here “algorithmic outputs,” claim First Amendment protection?

Hate Speech And The Demos, Jamal Greene

Faculty Scholarship

It is sometimes said that the statist and aristocratic traditions of Europe render its political institutions less democratic than those of the United States. Richard Posner writes of “the less democratic cast of European politics, as a result of which elite opinion is more likely to override public opinion than it is in the United States.” If that is true, then there are obvious ways in which it figures into debates over the wisdom of hate-speech regulation. The standard European argument in favor of such regulation may easily be characterized as antidemocratic: Restrictions on hate speech protect unpopular minority groups …

The Alchemy Of Dissent, Jamal Greene

Faculty Scholarship

On July 10, 2010, the Orange/Sullivan County NY 912 Tea Party organized a "Freedom from Tyranny" rally in the sleepy exurb of Middletown, New York. Via the group's online Meetup page, anyone who was "sick of the madness in Washington" and prepared to "[d]efend our freedom from Tyranny" was asked to gather on the grass next to the local Perkins restaurant and Super 8 motel for the afternoon rally. Protesters were encouraged to bring their lawn chairs for the picnic and fireworks to follow.

There was a time when I would have found an afternoon picnic a surprising response to …

Getting Permission, Philip A. Hamburger

Faculty Scholarship

Institutional Review Boards ("IRBs") are the instruments of a system of licensing – a system under which scholars, students, and other researchers must get permission to do research on human subjects. Although the system was established as a means of regulating research, it regulates research by licensing speech and the press. It is, in fact, so sweeping a system of licensing speech and the press that it is reminiscent of the seventeenth century, when Galileo Galilei had to submit to licensing and John Milton protested against it. Accordingly, it is necessary to examine the constitutionality of IRB licensing and, more …

The New Censorship: Institutional Review Boards, Philip A. Hamburger

Faculty Scholarship

Do federal regulations on Institutional Review Boards violate the First Amendment? Do these regulations establish a new sort of censorship? And what does this reveal about the role of the Supreme Court?

Holmes And The Marketplace Of Ideas, Vincent A. Blasi

Faculty Scholarship

At least five basic values might be served by a robust free speech principle: (1) individual autonomy; (2) truth seeking; (3) self-government; (4) the checking of abuses of power; (5) the promotion of good character. Free speech might serve one or more of these values by functioning in at least three different ways: (1) as a privileged activity; (2) as a social mechanism; (3) as a cultural force. My contention is that the conventional understanding of the most familiar metaphor in the First Amendment lexicon, the "marketplace of ideas," has had the undesirable effect of focusing attention too much on …

More Is Less, Philip A. Hamburger

Faculty Scholarship

Is the First Amendment's right of free exercise of religion conditional upon government interests? Many eighteenth-century Americans said it was utterly unconditional. For example, James Madison and numerous contemporaries declared in 1785 that "the right of every man to exercise ['Religion'] ... is in its nature an unalienable right" and "therefore that in matters of Religion, no mans right is abridged by the institution of Civil Society." In contrast, during the past forty years, the United States Supreme Court has repeatedly conditioned the right of free exercise on compelling government interests. The Court not merely qualifies the practice of the …

Application-Centered Internet Analysis, Tim Wu

Faculty Scholarship

There is a now-standard debate about law and the Internet. One side asserts that the Internet is so new and different that it calls for new legal approaches, even its own sovereign law. The other side argues that, although it is a new technology, the Internet nonetheless presents familiar legal problems. It is a battle of analogies: One side refers to Cyberspace as a place, while the other essentially equates the Internet and the telephone.

In my view, these two positions are both wrong and right: wrong in their characterization of the Internet as a whole, yet potentially right about …

Free Speech And Good Character, Vincent A. Blasi

Faculty Scholarship

Early proponents of the freedom of speech such as John Milton, John Stuart Mill, and Louis Brandeis emphasized the role expressive liberty plays in strengthening the character of persons entrusted with such freedom. These theorists argued that character traits such as civic courage, independence of mind, and the capacity to learn from experience and adapt are nurtured by trusting citizens with dangerous ideas. Today there is much talk about good character in relation to free speech disputes-but all on the side of those who would regulate speakers. It is time to remember that a concern about character cuts both ways …

Reading Holmes Through The Lens Of Schauer: The Abrams Dissent, Vincent A. Blasi

Faculty Scholarship

Even the best scholars rarely persuade. Mostly, they illuminate. They make us more discerning readers and interlocutors.

Here I want to illustrate how Frederick Schauer's work on the law of free speech can help us to read what may be the single most influential judicial opinion ever written on that subject, Justice Holmes's famous dissent in Abrams v. United States. So far as I am aware, Schauer has not produced anything like a line-by-line parsing of the Holmes opinion. I claim nevertheless that a reader familiar with Schauer's ideas is far better prepared on that account to understand what Holmes …

Spending Limits And The Squandering Of Candidates' Time, Vincent A. Blasi

Faculty Scholarship

Today I begin with a narrow agenda, a single idea, but an extravagant ambition. My narrow agenda is that I wish to address only the topic of campaign spending limits, and only the issue of their constitutionality in the face of First Amendment objections. The policy questions regarding whether spending limits are equitable, efficacious, and/or enforceable are deeply difficult and interesting but beyond my ken on this occasion.

My single idea is that spending limits are best justified on the ground that they protect candidates for office from having to devote an inordinate amount of their time to the task …

Harry Kalven, The Proust Of The First Amendment, Lee C. Bollinger

Faculty Scholarship

Reading A Worthy Tradition makes one nostalgic. For the generation of scholars who cut their first amendment teeth on Harry Kalven's articles, this book offers the experience of a recaptured past. The question is, however, does it offer anything more?

Search And Seizure Of The Media: A Statutory, Fourth Amendment And First Amendment Analysis, James S. Liebman

Faculty Scholarship

On the evening of October 10, 1974, police appeared at radio station KPFK-FM in Los Angeles with a warrant authorizing them to search the premises for a New World Liberation Front (NWLF) "communique" that took credit for a recent bombing. The officers conducted an intensive 8-hour search-combing files, listening to tapes, and looking through reporters' notes – finally concluding that the NWLF letter was not at the station. The KPFK search warrant was one of six that California law enforcement officials have executed at press offices since 1972. The circumstances surrounding the incident illustrate the rationale behind the recent development …