Law Commons^™

Son Of Sam And Dog Of Sam: Regulating Depictions Of Animal Cruelty Through The Use Of Criminal Anti-Profit Statutes, Emma Ricaurte

Animal Law Review

In 1991, Congress enacted 18 U.S.C. § 48, which prohibits the interstate sale and distribution of depictions of animal cruelty, in response to the proliferation of animal “crush videos” on the Internet. In 2008, the Third Circuit, in United States v. Stevens, a case involving dog fighting, held that the law was an unconstitutional restriction on free speech. In April of 2009, the Supreme Court of the United States granted certiorari. Discussions about the regulation of depictions of animal cruelty have largely focused on whether the child pornography or obscenity exceptions to the First Amendment should be extended to include …

A 'Ho New World: Raced And Gendered Insult As Ersatz Carnival And The Corruption Of Freedom Of Expression Norms, Lolita Buckner Inniss

Publications

Carnivalization, a concept developed by literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin and later employed in broad social and cultural contexts, is the tearing down of social norms, the elimination of boundaries, and the inversion of established hierarchies. It is the world turned upside down. Ersatz carnival is a pernicious, inverted form of carnival, one wherein counter-discourses propounded by outsiders are appropriated by elites and frequently redeployed to silence and exclude those same outsiders. The use of the slur "'ho" by gangsta' rappers in the performance of songs that articulate a vision of urban culture is an example of carnivalization. Thus, when words …

Constitutional Borrowing, Robert L. Tsai

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

Borrowing from one domain to promote ideas in another domain is a staple of constitutional decisionmaking. Precedents, arguments, concepts, tropes, and heuristics all can be carried across doctrinal boundaries for purposes of persuasion. Yet the practice itself remains underanalyzed. This Article seeks to bring greater theoretical attention to the matter. It defines what constitutional borrowing is and what it is not, presents a typology that describes its common forms, undertakes a principled defense of borrowing, and identifies some of the risks involved. The authors' examples draw particular attention to places where legal mechanisms and ideas migrate between fields of law …

Toward A Broadband Public Interest Standard, Anthony E. Varona

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

Although they emerged seven decades apart, commercial broadcasting and the Internet were greeted with similar excited declarations of their potential to transform American democracy by hosting an electronic free marketplace of ideas that would inform and enlighten citizens and catalyze discussion on issues of public importance. The federal government played a central role in the initial development and proliferation of both technologies, but then assumed very different regulatory orientations to the two industries once they were commercialized. In broadcasting, the government took on an interventionist posture promoting civic republican First Amendment values by means of a variety of public interest …

Brief Of Aarp, The National Legislative Association On Prescription Drug Prices, Community Catalyst, And Prescription Policy Choices, As Amici Curiae In Support Of Appellees, Ims Health Inc. V. Sorrell, Sean Flynn

Amicus Briefs & Court Filings

This brief supports protecting the confidentiality of prescription records in the state of Vermont from commercial uses by pharmeceutical companies to market new drugs to physicians directly.

No Enclaves Of Totalitarianism: The Triumph And Unrealized Promise Of The Tinker Decision, Jamin B. Raskin

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

The Supreme Court's decision in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District forty years ago did for the ideal of expressive freedom in America's public schools what Brown v. Board of Education did for the ideal of racial equality. It made a core value of the Bill of Rights spring to life for young people facing authoritarian treatment at the hands of adult officials running their school systems. By privileging the right of students to engage in passionate political communication over the school's interest in maintaining discipline or the community’s interest in maintaining pro-war consensus, the Tinker decision was …

Davis V. Fec: The First Amendment Rights Of A Wealthy Candidate, Jeremy Earl

Duke Journal of Constitutional Law & Public Policy Sidebar

No abstract provided.

Explaining Change And Rethinking Dirty Words: Fcc V. Fox Television Stations, Inc., Tobias Coleman

Duke Journal of Constitutional Law & Public Policy Sidebar

No abstract provided.

Cyber Civil Rights (November 2008; Mp3), Danielle Keats Citron

Faculty Scholarship

Social networking sites and blogs have increasingly become breeding grounds for anonymous online groups that attack women, people of color, and members of other traditionally disadvantaged groups. These destructive groups target individuals with defamation, threats of violence, and technology-based attacks that silence victims and concomitantly destroy their privacy. Victims go offline or assume pseudonyms to prevent future attacks, impoverishing online dialogue and depriving victims of the social and economic opportunities associated with a vibrant online presence. Attackers manipulate search engines to reproduce their lies and threats for employers and clients to see, creating digital "scarlet letters" that ruin reputations. Today's …

Pleasant Grove City V. Summum: Identifying Government Speech & Classifying Speech Forums, Aaron Harmon

Duke Journal of Constitutional Law & Public Policy Sidebar

In Pleasant Grove City v. Summum, the Supreme Court must decide whether a privately-donated Ten Commandments monument currently on display in a city park is the private speech of the donor or the government speech of Pleasant Grove City. Summum, a religious organization, sued Pleasant Grove City in federal court claiming that because the city had displayed in a city park a donated Ten Commandments monument, the First Amendment compelled the city to also accept and display Summum's proposed "Seven Aphorisms of Summum" monument. If the Court decides it is the private speech of the donor, it will have to …

Where's The Harm?: Free Speech And The Regulation Of Lies, Lyrissa Barnett Lidsky

UF Law Faculty Publications

False factual information has no First Amendment value, and yet the United States Supreme Court has accorded lies a measure of First Amendment protection. The First Amendment imposes something in the nature of a presumption against government interference in public discourse. This presumption is rooted in suspicion of the State's ability to distinguish facts from falsehoods as well as its motives for doing so. However, the presumption against regulation of false speech is not absolute. It can be overcome when verifiably false speech poses a direct threat of harm to individual interests. Unlike other countries, the United States has never …

Justice Kennedy's Gendered World, David S. Cohen

South Carolina Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Problems With The Reporter's Privilege, Eliason D. Eliason

American University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Performing Art: National Endowment For The Arts V. Finley, Randall P. Bezanson

Federal Communications Law Journal

In this modified version of a chapter in his forthcoming book, ART AND FREEDOM OF SPEECH (Univ. of Illinois Press, 2008-09), Professor Bezanson begins to probe the nature of art and its relation to the first amendment free speech guarantee. The essay uses the Finley v. NEA case, and specifically its discussion of Finley's performance art, to critique the Supreme Court's very approach to the Finley case, and to view the issues from the perspective of art, artistic freedom, and the Supreme Court's role in fashioning constitutional protection for art as art, and not simply as cognitive speech.

Antitrust Language Barriers: First Amendment Constraints On Defining An Antitrust Market By A Broadcast's Language, And Its Implications For Audiences, Competition, And Democracy, Catherine J.K. Sandoval

Federal Communications Law Journal

This Article explores whether the language of a broadcaster's program appropriately defines an antitrust market, consistent with First Amendment and antitrust principles. In its evaluation of the 2008 private equity buyout of Clear Channel Communications, the Department of Justice ("DOJ") defined the antitrust market by the language of the broadcast, as it had done for the 2003 merger of Univision and Hispanic Broadcasting Corporation. This Article uses social science research on Spanish and English-language radio and television to evaluate that decision. It argues that the distinct content and messages that characterize Spanish and English-language programming show that market definition is …

The Terrorist Is A Star!: Regulating Media Coverage Of Publicity-Seeking Crimes, Michelle Ward Ghetti

Federal Communications Law Journal

Publicity-seeking crimes, including terrorism, almost by definition depend on the media for their effectiveness. Twenty-five years ago, when the bulk of this article was written, critics both within and outside the news industry had begun to voice an awareness, if not a concern, for the ease with which such criminals obtained publicity on both a national and international platform and it looked as if something might be done within the media establishments to thwart this manipulation of the press. Today, it is possible to look back and see that, in fact, nothing has been done and, so, individuals such as …

Enacting A Reasonable Federal Shield Law: A Reply To Professors Clymer And Eliason, James Thomas Tucker, Wermiel

American University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Deep Background: Journalists, Sources, And The Perils Of Leaking, William E. Lee

American University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Speech Shouldn't Be "Free" At Funerals: An Analysis Of The Respect For America's Fallen Heroes Act, Zachary P. Augustine

Northern Illinois University Law Review

This comment analyzes the facial constitutionality of the protest limitation provisions of the Respect for America's Fallen Heroes Act under the First Amendment's free speech clause and concludes that they are constitutional time, place, and manner restrictions. The Act is facially content-neutral because it does not define the impermissible speech by reference to its content. Further, the Act was enacted for the content-neutral purpose of furthering the government's significant interest of protecting grieving families during funeral services. The restrictions are narrowly tailored because they only restrict speech that actually interferes with, or imminently will interfere with, the funeral service and …

Confronting The Limits Of The First Amendment: A Proactive Approach For Media Defendants Facing Liability Abroad, Michelle A. Wyant

San Diego International Law Journal

This Article confronts the limits this issue imposes on the First Amendment in four parts. Part I described the potential for conflicting defamation laws and forum shopping to undermine the American media's speech protections in the context of the Internet and global publications and outlines the Article's overall method of analysis. Part II first orients these conflicting defamation laws with respect to their development from the common law. It then frames them in terms of the underlying structural and policy differences that have produced their substantive divergence. This frame provides the analytical perspective through which this Article examines the varying …

Toward A Rfra That Works, Nicholas Nugent

Vanderbilt Law Review

The history of the Supreme Court's First Amendment jurisprudence regarding the proper standard of protection for the free exercise of religion is complicated. In determining how the First Amendment speaks to situations in which generally applicable health, welfare, and safety laws incidentally or accidentally burden certain individuals' religious practices, the Court has vacillated between different standards and different extremes, overruling itself several times. Early on, the Court held that, provided the government did not interfere deliberately with religion for religious reasons, an inadvertent interference with religious practice raised no Free xercise Clause problem,' "no matter how trivial the state's nonreligious …

Death Or Transformation? Educational Autonomy In The Roberts Court, Elizabeth Dale

UF Law Faculty Publications

In the aftermath of the Supreme Court's decisions in Grutter and Gratz a number of commentators argued that the Court had begun to embrace a new constitutional doctrine that required deference to the decisions of some institutions. Most notably they asserted that the Court would defer within the field of education. But even as they suggested that the Court was more willing to explore the doctrine, those two opinions left several large questions unanswered: Did the Court's embrace of institutional autonomy extend beyond higher education, into the K-12 realm? If so, what were its bounds? Was the doctrine only relevant …

Constitutional Law—First Amendment & Freedom Of Speech—Students May Be Regarded As Closed-Circuit Recipients Of The State's Anti Drug Message: The Supreme Court Creates A New Exception To The Tinker Student Speech Standard. Morse V. Frederick, 127 S. Ct. 2618 (2007), Megan D. Hargraves

University of Arkansas at Little Rock Law Review

This note argues that the Supreme Court's decision in Morse significantly weakens students' free speech rights. Although the Court stated that students "do not shed their constitutional rights at the school house gates," its decisions, in effect, weakens Tinker's important holding that students are entitled to First Amendment protection. The note asserts that the Court's opinion broadens schools' authority to regulate student speech in ways that are contrary to fundamental First Amendment values and explicitly allows schools to engage in highly suspect viewpoint discrimination.

The note first examines some of the fundamental First Amendment values at stake in student speech …

Digitus Impudicus: The Middle Finger And The Law, Ira Robbins

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

The middle finger is one of the most commonly used insulting gestures in the United States. The finger, which is used to convey a wide range of emotions, is visible on streets and highways, in schools, shopping malls, and sporting events, in courts and execution chambers, in advertisements and on magazine covers, and even on the hallowed floor of the United States Senate. Despite its ubiquity, however, as a number of recent cases demonstrate, those who use the middle finger in public run the risk of being stopped, arrested, prosecuted, fined, and even incarcerated under disorderly conduct or breach of …

Reassessing Turner And Litigating The Must-Carry Law Beyond A Facial Challenge, R. Matthew Warner

Federal Communications Law Journal

In recent decades, the must-carry rules have had a troubled constitutional history. After two sets of rules were struck down by the D.C. Circuit for violating the First Amendment rights of both cable programmers and operators, Congress revised the must-carry rules in the 1992 Cable Act. In 1997, the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision, determined that the congressional must-carry law was facially constitutional. However, does the Turner II decision preclude further First Amendment challenges to the must-carry law? This Note argues that the answer is no and that the time is drawing near for new challenges.

The Colonel's Finest Campaign: Robert R. Mccormick And Near V. Minnesota, Eric Easton

All Faculty Scholarship

Today, media corporations and their professional and trade associations, along with organizations like Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and the American Civil Liberties Union, carefully monitor litigation that implicates First Amendment values and decide whether, when, and how to intervene. It was not always so. Litigation by an institutional press to avoid or create doctrinal precedent under the First Amendment really began with the appointment of Col. Robert R. McCormick to head the ANPA's Committee on Freedom of the Press in the spring of 1928 and his involvement in Near v. Minnesota beginning that fall. Because of McCormick's …

Arbitrary And F^@#$*! Capricious: An Analysis Of The Second Circuit's Rejection Of The Fcc's Fleeting Expletive Regulation In Fox Television Stations, Inc. V. Fcc (2007), Justin Winquist

American University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Speaking Against Norms: Public Discourse And The Economy Of Racialization In The Workplace, Terry Smith

American University Law Review

Free speech controversies erupt from reactions to outlier voices, and these voices are often those of subordinated citizens such as racial minorities. Employing the tools of narrative, interviews with litigants and subjects, and interdisciplinary analysis of case law, Professor Terry Smith probes whether the social inequality of government employees of color affects the rigor of the First Amendment protection afforded their speech. Professor Smith argues that all public sector employees lack sufficient protection because their speech typically does not receive the highest constitutional scrutiny and because of the Supreme Court's recent decision in Garcetti v. Ceballos, which stripped public sector …

Shibboleths And Ceballos: Eroding Constitutional Rights Through Pseudocommunication, Susan Stuart

Law Faculty Publications

Recently, the Supreme Court rendered an inexplicable First Amendment decision that has far-reaching effects on the way government is held accountable to the public. In Garcetti v. Ceballos, the Court determined that a government employer can retaliate against an employee for doing his job correctly, notwithstanding the Constitution, so long as the employer targets speech that was part of the employee’s official duties. Inasmuch as government employees are often responsible for reporting government misconduct and other matters of public concern, this opinion essentially leaves the public unprotected from the unbridled discretion of government supervisors. The possible motivations for this …

Citizen Teacher: Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don't, Susan P. Stuart

Law Faculty Publications

The recent Supreme Court case of Garcetti v. Ceballos is becoming one of the most-used cases in its mere two-year history. It denies to public employees the protection of the First Amendment when speaking in their official duties. In reviewing the cases both leading up to and then relying oh Garcetti, one is struck by the inherent conflict that nowpermeates some school board-employee relationships. Whereas preceding cases attempted to reach a balance between the school board and its employees' speech rights, bad management practices now seem to trump the First Amendment. Such practices have school boards discharging teachers and …