Law Commons^™

The U.S. Supreme Court Addresses The Child Pornography Prevention Act And Child Online Protection Act In Ashcroft V. Free Speech Coalition And Ashcroft V. American Civil Liberties Union, Sue Ann Mota

Federal Communications Law Journal

Both the Child Pornography Prevention Act ("CPPA") and the Child Online Protection Act ("COPA") were intended by Congress to protect minors. The CPPA was intended to protect minors from the harmful effects of virtual child pornography. The COPA was intended to protect minors from pornography currently available commercially on the World Wide Web. However, in 2002, the U.S. Supreme Court addressed the constitutionality of both statutes: The Court struck down sections of the CPPA as overbroad and unconstitutional in Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition. In Ashcroft v. ACLU, the Court upheld some sections of COPA as not unconstitutionally overbroad, but …

Injunctive Relief In The Internet Age: The Battle Between Free Speech And Trade Secrets, Adam W. Johnson

Federal Communications Law Journal

The information revolution has led to technological innovations in the movement, storage, and dissemination of information. The Internet allows a person, with good or bad intent, to distribute information to millions of people. This ability raises serious implications when trade secret information is the subject of Internet postings. Once a trade secret becomes publicly available, it loses its legal secrecy, and special legal protection. Additionally, competitors and everyone else on the Internet can gain access to the information. For those who rely on trade secret protection to guard their inventions, this presents a growing concern.

This Note will illustrate the …

Deciding When Hate Is A Crime: The First Amendment, Police Detectives, And The Identification Of Hate Crime, Jeannine Bell

Articles by Maurer Faculty

This Article adds to the debate a story of how hate crime law is enforced, based on the experiences of the police detectives who are required to enforce hate crime law. Part I of this Article provides a brief description of hate crime laws and argues that the police play an important role in the determination of how hate crime law is enforced and ultimately, whether defendants’ First Amendment rights will be respected. Part II describes critics’ concerns about defendants’ First Amendment rights and the narrow constitutional line that enforcers of hate crime law must walk between enforcing hate crime …

Constitutional Issues In Information Privacy, Fred H. Cate, Robert E. Litan

Articles by Maurer Faculty

The U.S. Constitution has been largely ignored in the recent flurry of privacy laws and regulations designed to protect personal information from incursion by the private sector, despite the fact that many of these enactments and efforts to enforce them significantly implicate the First Amendment. Questions about the role of the Constitution have assumed new importance in the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Efforts to identify and bring to justice the perpetrators and to protect against future terrorist attacks, while threatening to weaken constitutional protections against government intrusions into personal …