Law Commons^™

Group Defamation, Power, And A New Test For Determining Plaintiff Eligibility, Jeffrey Greenwood

Fordham Intellectual Property, Media and Entertainment Law Journal

In the fall of 2014, Rolling Stone Magazine published an article describing the rape of a woman at a University of Virginia fraternity house. The story turned out to be false, and members of the fraternity sued for defamation. The suit raises an interesting question: under what circumstances may anonymous individual members of the fraternity recover? This Note describes the case, related common and constitutional law, as well as differences in group defamation doctrine across jurisdictions. After detailing problems with the existing paradigm, the Note proposes a new method for performing the analysis.

Suing The President For First Amendment Violations, Sonja R. West

Scholarly Works

On any given day, it seems, President Donald Trump can be found attacking, threatening, or punishing the press and other individuals whose speech he dislikes. His actions, moreover, inevitably raise the question: Do any of these individuals or organizations (or any future ones) have a viable claim against the President for violating their First Amendment rights?

One might think that the ability to sue the President for violation of the First Amendment would be relatively settled. The answer, however, is not quite that straightforward. Due to several unique qualities about the First Amendment and the presidency, it is not entirely …

The Right Of Publicity: Privacy Reimagined For New York?, Jennifer E. Rothman

All Faculty Scholarship

This essay is based on a featured lecture that I gave as part of the Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal’s 2 symposium on a proposed right of publicity law in New York. The essay draws from my recent book, The Right of Publicity: Privacy Reimagined for a Public World, published by Harvard University Press. Insights from the book suggest that New York should not upend more than one hundred years of established privacy law in the state, nor jeopardize its citizens’ ownership over their own names, likenesses, and voices by replacing these privacy laws with a new and independent …