Law Commons^™

Section 230 Immunity: How The Trump Era Has Exposed The Current Conflict Between The First Amendment And The Good Samaritan Clause In The Modern Public Square, Brandon Salter, Dhillon Ramkhelawn

University of Arkansas at Little Rock Law Review

No abstract provided.

Constitutional Law—Where Does It Fit? Solving The School Board Prayer Puzzle, Austin Reed

University of Arkansas at Little Rock Law Review

No abstract provided.

Constitutional Law—The Erosion Of Political Anonymity And Its Chilling Effect On Freedom Of Association: Reconsidering The Constitutionality Of The Mandated Public Disclosure Of Individuals’ Political Donations, Scout Snowden

University of Arkansas at Little Rock Law Review

No abstract provided.

Selecting Scrutiny In Compelled-Speech Cases Involving Non-Commercial Expression: The Formulaic Landscape Of A Strict Scrutiny World After Becerra And Janus, And A First Amendment Interests-And-Values Alternative, Clay Calvert

Fordham Intellectual Property, Media and Entertainment Law Journal

This Article examines how courts select the standard of scrutiny—strict, intermediate, or something akin to rational basis—in compelled-speech disputes following the United States Supreme Court’s 2018 rulings in National Institute of Family and Life Advocates v. Becerra and Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees. The compelled-speech doctrine provides individuals and entities with a qualified First Amendment right not to be forced by the government to convey messages under certain circumstances. This principle sometimes is referred to as an unenumerated First Amendment right not to speak. The Article concentrates on compelled-speech mandates involving non-commercial expression in …

Speech Inequality After Janus V. Afscme, Charlotte Garden

Indiana Law Journal

This Article explores the growing divide between the Roberts Court’s treatment of the free speech rights of wealthy individuals and corporations in campaign finance cases as compared to its treatment of the rights of public-sector labor unions and their members. First, it highlights some internal contradictions in the Janus Court’s analysis. Then, it discusses the growing—yet mostly ignored—divergence in the Court’s treatment of corporate and labor speakers with respect to the use of market influence to achieve political influence.

The Article has two Parts. In Part I, I explain how the Court reached its decision in Janus before critiquing the …

Religious Accommodation, The Establishment Clause, And Third-Party Harm, Mark Storslee

Faculty Scholarship

In the wake of Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, religious accommodation has become increasingly controversial. That controversy has given rise to a new legal theory gaining popularity among academics and possibly a few Supreme Court justices: the idea that the First Amendment's Establishment Clause condemns accommodations whenever they generate anything beyond a minimal cost for third parties.

The third-party thesis is appealing. But this Article argues that there are good reasons to believe it falls short as an interpretation of the Establishment Clause. In its place, the Article offers a new theory for understanding the relationship between costly accommodations and the …

Separation Of Functions For Ai: Restraining Speech Regulation By Online Platforms, Niva Elkin-Koren, Maayan Perel

Lewis & Clark Law Review

The Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution restricts government regulation of private speech. However, it generally does not apply to private management of speech. New forms of speech regulation by online platforms disrupt this constitutional framework. Platforms, such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter, are responsible for mediating much of the public discourse and governing access to speech and speakers around the world. These private businesses match users and content in whatever way best benefits their commercial interests. At the same time, however, they exercise regulatory power when they filter, block, and remove content at the …

Private Schools' Role And Rights In Setting Vaccination Policy: A Constitutional And Statutory Puzzle, Hillel Y. Levin

Scholarly Works

Measles and other vaccine-preventable childhood diseases are making a comeback, as a growing number of parents are electing not to vaccinate their children. May private schools refuse admission to these students? This deceptively simple question raises complex issues of First Amendment law and statutory interpretation, and it also has implications for other current hot-button issues in constitutional law, including whether private schools may discriminate against LGBTQ students. This Article is the first to address the issue of private schools’ rights to exclude unvaccinated children. It finds that the answer is “it depends.” It also offers a model law that states …

Copyright And Human Rights In The Ballroom: A Minuet Between The United States And The Eu, Maria Lillà Montagnani, Alina Trapova

Mitchell Hamline Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Pharma Perspective: The Double-Edged Sword Of Direct-To-Consumer Advertising, Ela H. Yalcin

Health Law Outlook

No abstract provided.

Discrimination, The Speech That Enables It, And The First Amendment, Helen Norton

Publications

Imagine that you’re interviewing for your dream job, only to be asked by the hiring committee whether you’re pregnant. Or HIV positive. Or Muslim. Does the First Amendment protect your interviewers’ inquiries from government regulation? This Article explores that question.

Antidiscrimination laws forbid employers, housing providers, insurers, lenders, and other gatekeepers from relying on certain characteristics in their decision-making. Many of these laws also regulate those actors’ speech by prohibiting them from inquiring about applicants’ protected class characteristics; these provisions seek to stop illegal discrimination before it occurs by preventing gatekeepers from eliciting information that would enable them to discriminate. …

Gillis V. Miller, Anna Tichy

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

From The Legal Literature: Criminalizing Propaganda: J. Remy Green’S Argument To Digitize Brandenburg, Francesca Laguardia

Department of Justice Studies Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

No abstract provided.

The Internet As A Speech Machine And Other Myths Confounding Section 230 Reform, Danielle K. Citron, Mary Anne Franks

Faculty Scholarship

A robust public debate is currently underway about the responsibility of online platforms. We have long called for this discussion, but only recently has it been seriously taken up by legislators and the public. The debate begins with a basic question: should platforms should be responsible for user-generated content? If so, under what circumstances? What exactly would such responsibility look like? Under consideration is Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act—a provision originally designed to encourage tech companies to clean up “offensive” online content. The public discourse around Section 230, however, is riddled with misconceptions. As an initial matter, many …

Religious Freedom And The Churches: Contemporary Challenges In The United States Today, Richard W. Garnett

Journal Articles

A crucial, but often overlooked, dimension of the human and constitutional right to religious freedom is the autonomy of religious institutions, associations and societies with respect to matters of governance, doctrine, formation and membership. Although the Supreme Court of the United States has affirmed this autonomy in the context of American constitutional law, it is vulnerable, and even under threat, for a variety of reasons, including a general decline in the health of civil society and mediating associations and a crisis of confidence and authority caused by clerical sexual abuse and churches’ failure to respond to it.

First Amendment Traditionalism, Marc O. Degirolami

Faculty Publications

Traditionalist constitutional interpretation takes political and cultural practices of long age and duration as constituting the presumptive meaning of the text. This Essay probes traditionalism's conceptual and normative foundations. It focuses on the Supreme Court's traditionalist interpretation of the First Amendment to understand the distinctive justifications for traditionalism and the relationship between traditionalism and originalism. The first part of the Essay identifies and describes traditionalism in some of the Court's Speech and Religion Clause jurisprudence, highlighting its salience in the Court's recent Establishment Clause doctrine.

Part II develops two justfications for traditionalism: "interpretive" and "democratic-populist." The interpretive justification is that …

Stopping The Resurgence Of Vaccine-Preventable Childhood Diseases: Policy, Politics, And Law, Hillel Y. Levin, Stacie Patrice Kershner, Timothy D. Lytton, Daniel Salmon, Saad B. Omer

Scholarly Works

Mandatory vaccination programs in the United States are generally successful, but their continued success is under threat. The ever-increasing number of parents who opt their children out of vaccination recommendations has caused severe outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases. Public health advocates have pushed for changes to state laws, but their efforts have generally been unsuccessful. We suggest that their lack of success is due to public health advocates’ failures to contend with the features of the political system that impede change and to propose reforms that are ethically defensible, efficacious, and politically feasible. Based on our earlier public health studies, ethical …

Internet Architecture And Disability, Blake E. Reid

Publications

The Internet is essential for education, employment, information, and cultural and democratic participation. For tens of millions of people with disabilities in the United States, barriers to accessing the Internet—including the visual presentation of information to people who are blind or visually impaired, the aural presentation of information to people who are deaf or hard of hearing, and the persistence of Internet technology, interfaces, and content without regard to prohibitive cognitive load for people with cognitive and intellectual disabilities—collectively pose one of the most significant civil rights issues of the information age. Yet disability law lacks a comprehensive theoretical approach …

Symposium: The California Consumer Privacy Act, Margot Kaminski, Jacob Snow, Felix Wu, Justin Hughes

Publications

This symposium discussion of the Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review focuses on the newly enacted California Consumer Privacy Act (CPPA), a statute signed into state law by then-Governor Jerry Brown on June 28, 2018 and effective as of January 1, 2020. The panel was held on February 20, 2020.

The panelists discuss how businesses are responding to the new law and obstacles for consumers to make effective use of the law’s protections and rights. Most importantly, the panelists grapple with questions courts are likely to have to address, including the definition of personal information under the CCPA, the application …

Avoidance Creep, Charlotte Garden

Faculty Articles

At first glance, constitutional avoidance—the principle that courts construe statutes so as to avoid conflict with the Constitution whenever possible—appears both unremarkable and benign. But when courts engage in constitutional avoidance, they frequently construe statutory language in a manner contrary to both its plain meaning and to the underlying congressional intent. Then, successive decisions often magnify the problems of avoidance—a phenomenon I call “avoidance creep.” When a court distorts a statute in service of constitutional avoidance, a later court may amplify the distortion, incrementally changing both statutory and constitutional doctrine in ways that are unsupported by any existing rationale for …

First Amendment (Un)Exceptionalism: A Comparative Taxonomy Of Campaign Finance Reform Proposals In The United States And United Kingdom, Lori A. Ringhand

Scholarly Works

There is an urgent conversation happening among the world’s democracies about how to respond to the combined threat of online electioneering and foreign interference in domestic elections. Despite the shadow such activities cast over the 2016 presidential election in the United States, the US has been largely absent from comparative discussions about how to tackle the problem. This is not just because of a recalcitrant president. The assumption that America’s “First Amendment Exceptionalism” – the idea that American freedom of expression law is simply too much of an outlier to warrant useful comparative consideration – is strong on both sides …

Reconceptualizing Hybrid Rights, Dan T. Coenen

Scholarly Works

In landmark decisions on religious liberty and same-sex marriage, and many other cases as well, the Supreme Court has placed its imprimatur on so called “hybrid rights.” These rights spring from the interaction of two or more constitutional clauses, none of which alone suffices to give rise to the operative protection. Controversy surrounds hybrid rights in part because there exists no judicial account of their justifiability. To be sure, some scholarly treatments suggest that these rights emanate from the “structures” or “penumbras” of the Constitution. But critics respond that hybrid rights lack legitimacy for that very reason because structural and …

All The Border's A Stage: Humanitarian Aid As Expressive Dissent, Jason A. Cade

Scholarly Works

Immigration enforcement along the Southwest border between the United States and Mexico has long channeled immigrants into perilous desert corridors, where many thousands have dies, out of the public view. In response to this humanitarian crisis, activists from organizations such as No More Deaths (NMD) trek deep into the treacherous desert, hoping to save lives, honor the remains of those who did not survive, and influence public opinion about border enforcement policies. NMD's activism is not merely utilitarian but also deeply expressive; ultimately, they hope to convey the message that all lives -- including those of unauthorized migrants-- are worth …

The Modern Fight For Media Freedom In The United States, Jonathan Peters

Scholarly Works

The First Amendment as a subject is challenging and provocative, and scholarly and popular understandings of it are changing. New communication technologies are pushing lawyers, judges, and scholars to revisit, and sometimes rethink, old legal doctrines and concepts. In the area of privacy, we have to think today about encryption and a website's terms of service. In the area of copyright, we have to think about peer-to-peer file sharing and the licenses granted by iTunes. In the area of sexual expression, we have to think about sexting, revenge porn, and deep fakes.'

This is the emerging state of play for …

The Majoritarian Press Clause, Sonja R. West

Scholarly Works

In early 2018, stories began circulating that something troubling was happening at the United States-Mexico border. The reports claimed that the United States government was separating migrant families and then holding children (as well as adults) by the thousands in crowded, possibly inhumane environments. There were alarming accounts of children who were sick, dirty, hungry, neglected, and sleeping on concrete floors.

Americans, of course, demanded answers: What was happening at these migrant detention centers? Why was it happening? What were the official policies involved? Were the government's actions appropriate? Were they legal? In other words, this was a textbook example …

Misinformation Mayhem: Social Media Platforms’ Efforts To Combat Medical And Political Misinformation, Dawn C. Nunziato

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

Social media platforms today are playing an ever-expanding role in shaping the contours of today’s information ecosystem. The events of recent months have driven home this development, as the platforms have shouldered the burden and attempted to rise to the challenge of ensuring that the public is informed – and not misinformed – about matters affecting our democratic institutions in the context of our elections, as well as about matters affecting our very health and lives in the context of the pandemic. This Article examines the extensive role recently assumed by social media platforms in the marketplace of ideas in …

Facebook's Speech Code And Policies: How They Suppress Speech And Distort Democratic Deliberation, Joseph Thai

Faculty Articles

With nearly two and a half billion users-a third of the world's population- Facebook far and away hosts the largest speech platform in the history of humanity. In the United States, seven out of ten adults use it, and nearly half get news from it. It is therefore no exaggeration to observe that Facebook's self-promulgated rules for "what is and is not allowed on Facebook," its content-based Community Standards, rival if not exceed the First Amendment's importance in shaping discourse in the United States. Yet, unlike the First Amendment, which only protects against government censorship, no scholarship has scrutinized the …

Fixed Stars: Famous First Amendment Phrases And Their Indelible Impact, David L. Hudson Jr., Jacob David Glenn

Law Faculty Scholarship

Some passages in First Amendment law have taken on a life and legend of their own, entering our cultural lexicon for their particular power, precision or passion. Some phrases are just so beautifully written that they cannot escape notice. Others aptly capture the essence of a key concept in a memorable way. Still others seemingly have grown in importance simply by the frequency for which they are cited in later court decisions. This article analyzes ten phrases from U.S. Supreme Court First Amendment decisions that qualify as some of the most enduring passages in First Amendment jurisprudence.

State Of The Unions: The Impact Of Janus On Public University Student Fees, Jonathan Kaufman

Georgia Law Review

In Janus v. American Federation of State, County,
and Municipal Employees, Council 31, the U.S.
Supreme Court overruled forty-one years of precedent
that had allowed public-sector unions to collect
agency-shop fees from nonmembers. The Court ruled this
mandatory fee collection unconstitutional as a violation
of nonmember First Amendment rights. This decision
may pose problems for other public entities, such as
public universities, who also collect mandatory fees that
support political speech.

Taking Stock Of The Religion Clauses, John D. Inazu

Scholarship@WashULaw

After a few decades of relative quiet, the Supreme Court has in recent years focused once again on the religion clauses and related statutes.