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Your Money Or Your Speech: The Children's Internet Protection Act And The Congressional Assault On The First Amendment In Public Libraries, Steven D. Hinckley Mar 2012

Your Money Or Your Speech: The Children's Internet Protection Act And The Congressional Assault On The First Amendment In Public Libraries, Steven D. Hinckley

Steven D. Hinckley

This article examines the inherent conflict between This article examines the inherent conflict between two Congressional approaches to public access to the Internet - the provision of federal funding support to schools and public libraries to ensure broad access to online information regardless of financial means, and federal restrictions on children's use of school and public library computers to access content that the government feels could be harmful to them. It analyzes the efficacy and constitutionality of the Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA), Congress's attempt to use its powers of the purse to control objectionable online content in the very …


Disclosure's Effects: Wikileaks And Transparency, Mark Fenster Feb 2012

Disclosure's Effects: Wikileaks And Transparency, Mark Fenster

Mark Fenster

Constitutional, criminal, and administrative laws regulating government transparency, and the theories that support them, rest on the assumption that the disclosure of information has transformative effects: disclosure can inform, enlighten, and energize the public, or it can create great harm or stymie government operations. To resolve disputes over difficult cases, transparency laws and theories typically balance disclosure’s beneficial effects against its harmful ones. WikiLeaks and its vigilante approach to massive document leaks challenge the underlying assumption about disclosure’s effects in two ways. First, WikiLeaks’s ability to receive and distribute leaked information cheaply, quickly, and seemingly unstoppably enables it to bypass …


How The Movies Became Speech, Samantha Barbas Jan 2012

How The Movies Became Speech, Samantha Barbas

Journal Articles

In its 1915 decision in Mutual Film v. Industrial Commission of Ohio, the Supreme Court held that motion pictures were, as a medium, unprotected by freedom of speech and press because they were mere “entertainment” and “spectacles” with a “capacity for evil.” Mutual legitimated an extensive regime of film censorship that existed until the 1950s. It was not until 1952, in Burstyn v. Wilson, that the Court declared motion pictures to be, like the traditional press, an important medium for the communication of ideas protected by the First Amendment. By the middle of the next decade, film censorship in the …


First Amendment, Fourth Estate, And Hot News: Misappropriation Is Not A Solution To The Journalism Crisis, Joseph A. Tomain Jan 2012

First Amendment, Fourth Estate, And Hot News: Misappropriation Is Not A Solution To The Journalism Crisis, Joseph A. Tomain

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Journalism is a public good. The Framers understood the importance of a free press in a self-governing society and embedded a structural right for freedom of the press in the First Amendment. There is a journalism crisis. Symptoms of the crisis include layoffs of journalists, diminishing content in newspapers and shuttering of newspapers. The rise of online technologies has exacerbated the crisis, mainly by siphoning advertising revenue away from traditional news organizations to free classified advertisement websites such as Craigslist, search engines and myriad other non-journalistic online endeavors. The internet, however, is not the main cause of the journalism crisis. …