Law Commons^™

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.

Beyond Unreasonable, John D. Inazu

Scholarship@WashULaw

The concept of “reasonableness” permeates the law: the “reasonable person” determines the outcome of torts and contracts disputes, the criminal burden of proof requires factfinders to reach conclusions “beyond a reasonable doubt,” and claims of self-defense succeed or fail on reasonableness determinations. But as any first-year law student can attest, the line between reasonable and unreasonable is not always clear. Nor is that the only ambiguity. In the realm of the unreasonable, many of us intuit that some actions are not only unreasonable but beyond the pale—we might say they are beyond unreasonable. Playing football, summiting Nanga Parbat, and attempting …

Conflicting Reports: When Gun Rights Threaten Free Speech, Gregory P. Magarian

Scholarship@WashULaw

This Article catalogs and analyzes collisions between free speech and gun rights. The most important and hotly debated of those collisions is the clash between the First Amendment rights to assemble and speak in public political protests and the asserted Second Amendment right to carry firearms openly in public places. Beyond protests, public university students’ First Amendment rights to speak and learn clash with the asserted Second Amendment right to carry concealed weapons on university campuses; First Amendment interests in robust political deliberation clash with Second Amendment interests in promoting and securing the right to keep and bear arms; and …

Church Taxes And The Original Understanding Of The Establishment Clause, Mark Storslee

Faculty Scholarship

Since the Supreme Court’s decision in Everson v. Board of Education, it has been widely assumed that the Establishment Clause forbids government from 'aiding' or subsidizing religious activity, especially religious schools. This Article suggests that this reading of the Establishment Clause rests on a misunderstanding of Founding-era history, especially the history surrounding to church taxes. Contrary to popular belief, the decisive argument against those taxes was not an unqualified assertion that subsidizing religion was prohibited. Rather, the crucial argument was that church taxes were a coerced religious observance: a government-mandated sacrifice to God, a tithe. Understanding that argument helps …

Tinkering With Circuit Conflicts Beyond The Schoolhouse Gate, Stephen Wermiel

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

No abstract provided.

Constitutional Law And The Presidential Nomination Process, Richard Briffault

Faculty Scholarship

The Constitution says nothing about the presidential nominating process and has had little direct role in the evolution of that process from congressional caucuses to party national conventions to our current primary-dominated system of selecting convention delegates. Yet, constitutional law is a factor in empowering and constraining the principal actors in the nomination process and in shaping the framework for potential future changes.

The constitutional law of the presidential nomination process operates along two axes: government-party, and state-national. The government-party dimension focuses on the tension between the states and the federal government in writing the rules for and administering the …

Antitrust & Corruption: Overruling Noerr, Tim Wu

Faculty Scholarship

We live in a time when concerns about influence over the American political process by powerful private interests have reached an apogee, both on the left and the right. Among the laws originally intended to fight excessive private influence over republican institutions were the antitrust laws, whose sponsors were concerned not just with monopoly, but also its influence over legislatures and politicians. While no one would claim that the antitrust laws were meant to be comprehensive anti-corruption laws, there can be little question that they were passed with concerns about the political influence of powerful firms and industry cartels.

Since …

Fosta: A Necessary Step In Advancement Of The Women’S Rights Movement, Alexandra Sanchez

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Platforms And The Fall Of The Fourth Estate: Looking Beyond The First Amendment To Protect Watchdog Journalism, Erin C. Carroll

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Journalists see the First Amendment as an amulet, and with good reason. It has long protected the Fourth Estate—an independent institutional press—in its exercise of editorial discretion to check government power. This protection helped the Fourth Estate flourish in the second half of the twentieth century and ably perform its constitutional watchdog role.

But in the last two decades, the media ecology has changed. The Fourth Estate has been subsumed by a Networked Press in which journalists are joined by engineers, algorithms, audience, and other human and non-human actors in creating and distributing news. The Networked Press’s most powerful members …

The Freedom Of Speech-Conduct, John Fee

Faculty Scholarship

Part I sets up the fundamental tension between the Supreme Court's celebrated line of decisions recognizing expressive conduct as speech and its reasons for refusing to recognize all forms of communicative behavior as speech, showing that both sets of motivating concerns are valid (even if misunderstood). Part II explores the traditional method of resolving this tension by measuring the expressiveness individual behavior, concluding that none of the various tests and criteria the Court has used can sensibly reconcile the competing concerns of Part I. Parts III, IV, and V propose and develop an alternative state-action-based approach for assigning levels of …

Free Speech And Off-Label Rights, Amy J. Sepinwall

Georgia Law Review

When a litigant invokes a constitutional right to
protect interests different from the ones underpinning
the right, he engages in what this Article calls an
off-label rights exercise. The Free Speech Clause has
recently become an especially prominent, and troubling,
site of off-label rights exercises. Two of the most
prominent cases in the Supreme Court’s last term
involved litigants who invoked their constitutional
rights to free speech to protect interests unrelated to
speech or expression. In Janus v. American Federation
of State, County, & Municipal Employees, a state
employee argued that forcing him to pay for the union’s
bargaining activities …

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.

Censorship, Free Speech & Facebook: Applying The First Amendment To Social Media Platforms Via The Public Function Exception, Matthew P. Hooker

Washington Journal of Law, Technology & Arts

Society has a love-hate relationship with social media. Thanks to social media platforms, the world is more connected than ever before. But with the ever-growing dominance of social media there have come a mass of challenges. What is okay to post? What isn't? And who or what should be regulating those standards? Platforms are now constantly criticized for their content regulation policies, sometimes because they are viewed as too harsh and other times because they are characterized as too lax. And naturally, the First Amendment quickly enters the conversation. Should social media platforms be subject to the First Amendment? Can—or …

Courts, Trademarks, And The Icann Gold Rush: No Free Speech In Top Level Domains, Jerome O'Callaghan, Paula O'Callaghan

Loyola of Los Angeles Entertainment Law Review

In recent years, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) expanded top-level domains, such as .com, .net, and .org, to include a very wide variety of new terms. One of the new options is .sucks. This Article examines the potential for conflict when trademark holders seek to protect their mark in the context of the .sucks domain. There is a temptation to see this issue in terms of consumers’ free speech rights pitted against corporate interests. However, the recent privatization of ICANN does not bode well for promoting consumers’ First Amendment rights in domain name battles.

Deep Fakes: A Looming Challenge For Privacy, Democracy, And National Security, Robert Chesney, Danielle K. Citron

Faculty Scholarship

Harmful lies are nothing new. But the ability to distort reality has taken an exponential leap forward with “deep fake” technology. This capability makes it possible to create audio and video of real people saying and doing things they never said or did. Machine learning techniques are escalating the technology’s sophistication, making deep fakes ever more realistic and increasingly resistant to detection. Deep-fake technology has characteristics that enable rapid and widespread diffusion, putting it into the hands of both sophisticated and unsophisticated actors. While deep-fake technology will bring with it certain benefits, it also will introduce many harms. The marketplace …

Bitcoin Is Speech: Notes Toward Developing The Conceptual Contours Of Its Protection Under The First Amendment, Justin S. Wales, Richard J. Ovelmen

University of Miami Law Review

Bitcoin permits users to engage in direct expressive activity with one another without the need for centralized intermediaries. It does so by utilizing an open and community-managed global database called a blockchain. While much of the literature about Bitcoin has focused on its use as a form of digital payment, this Article suggests an expanded understanding by demonstrating its use as a protocol network, not unlike the internet, that can be used to extend the possible range of human expression. After developing an appreciation of the technology, this Article recommends a framework for applying the First Amendment to Bitcoin and …

Let History Repeat Itself: Solving Originalism's History Problem In Interpreting The Establishment Clause, Neil Joseph

Duke Journal of Constitutional Law & Public Policy Sidebar

The Supreme Court's Establishment Clause jurisprudence is all over the place. The current justices have widely divergent views on the Establishment Clause's meaning, and the Lemon test has been widely panned by several justices. Originalist judges, however, have had a fairly consistent approach to interpreting the Establishment Clause. This largely stems from their reliance on history. This Note argues that their use of history in analyzing the Establishment Clause is flawed. Originalist Establishment Clause jurisprudence has been and is criticized for being unprincipled. And those criticisms are correct. Originalists encounter such criticism because the justices struggle to reconcile historical practice …

The Legal Implications Of Synthetic And Manipulated Media, Thomas E. Kadri

Popular Media

Ahead of the U.S. 2020 presidential election, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace convened more than 100 experts from three dozen organizations inside and outside Silicon Valley in private meetings to help address the challenges that synthetic and manipulated media pose for industry, government, and society more broadly. Among other things, the meetings developed a common understanding of the potential for synthetic and manipulated media circulated on technology platforms to disrupt the upcoming presidential election, generated definitions of “inappropriate” election-related synthetic and manipulated media that have informed platform content moderation policies, and equipped platforms with playbooks of effective and ethical …

The First Amendment And Speech Urging Suicide: Lessons From The Case Of Michelle Carter And The Need To Expand Brandenburg'S Application, Clay Calvert

UF Law Faculty Publications

This Article examines the level of First Amendment protection that applies when a defendant-speaker is charged with involuntary manslaughter based on successfully urging a person to commit suicide. The Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts’ February 2019 decision in Commonwealth v. Carter provides a timely analytical springboard. The Article argues that courts should adopt the United States Supreme Court’s test for incitement created a half-century ago in Brandenburg v. Ohio before such speech is deemed unprotected by the First Amendment. It contends this standard is appropriate even in involuntary manslaughter cases where intent to cause a specific result is not required …

Political Activist + Public Servant?, Sharon Murchie

Language Arts Journal of Michigan

How do we write as political activists while also working as public servants? Do we have freedom of speech as public school teachers? Can—and should—our writing and our speech be censored? How can we write and work for social and political change, when we are charged with remaining apolitical in the classroom? This article outlines the limitations on teachers’ First Amendment Rights and is both a call to action and a call to caution.

American Legion V. American Humanist Association, Seth T. Bonilla

Public Land & Resources Law Review

The separation of church and state is a key element of American democracy, but its interpretation has been challenged as the country grows more diverse. In American Legion v. American Humanist Association, the Supreme Court adopted a new standard to analyze whether a religious symbol on public land maintained by public funding violated the Constitution’s Establishment Clause.

Making Room For Big Data: Web Scraping And An Affirmative Right To Access Publicly Available Information Online, Amber Zamora

The Journal of Business, Entrepreneurship & the Law

This paper will explore the legality of web scraping through the lens of recent litigation between web scraper hiQ Labs and the online professional networking platform, LinkedIn. First, the paper will study the background of web scraping litigation, some challenges courts face in issuing consistent verdicts, and the most common claims companies make against web scrapers. Then the paper will address three of the most common claims and identify court motivations and limitations within the doctrines. The first claims are those arising from the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). Next, the paper will investigate copyright claims and defenses …

The Defamation Injunction Meets The Prior Restraint Doctrine, Doug Rendleman

San Diego Law Review

This article maintains that, under defined circumstances, a judge should be able to grant an injunction that forbids the defendant’s proved defamation. It analyzes the common law of defamation, the constitutional prior restraint doctrine, the constitutional protection for defamation that stems from New York Times v. Sullivan, and injunctions and their enforcement.

In Near v. Minnesota, the Supreme Court expanded protection for expression by adding an injunction to executive licensing as a prior restraint. Although the Near court circumscribed the injunction as a prior restraint, it approved criminal sanctions and damages judgment for defamation. An injunction that forbids the defendant’s …

When Legislatures Become The Ally Of Academic Freedom: The First State Intellectual Diversity Statute And Its Effect On Academic Freedom, Patrick M. Garry

South Carolina Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Post-Truth First Amendment, Sarah Haan

Indiana Law Journal

Post-truthism is widely viewed as a political problem. This Article explores posttruthism as a constitutional law problem, and argues that, because post-truthism offers a normative framework for regulating information, we should take it seriously as a basis for law.

In its exploration of the influence of post-truth ideas on law, the Article focuses on the compelled speech doctrine. When the State mandates disclosure, it pits the interests of unwilling speakers against the interests of listeners. In the twenty-first century, speakers who are targeted by mandatory disclosure laws are often organizational actors with informational advantages, such as corporations. Listeners who stand …

Wither Zauderer, Blossom Heightened Scrutiny? How The Supreme Court’S 2018 Rulings In Becerra And Janus Exacerbate Problems With Compelled-Speech Jurisprudence, Clay Calvert

UF Law Faculty Publications

This Article examines how the United States Supreme Court’s 2018 decisions in the First Amendment cases of National Institute of Family & Life Advocates v. Becerra and Janus v. American Federation of State, County, & Municipal Employees, Council 31, muddle an already disorderly compelled-speech doctrine. Specifically, dual five-to-four decisions in Becerra and Janus raise key questions about the level of scrutiny—either a heightened test or a deferential variant of rational basis review—against which statutes compelling expression should be measured. Critically, Becerra illustrates the willingness of the Court’s conservative Justices to narrowly confine the aging compelled-speech test from Zauderer v. …

When Protest Is The Disaster: Constitutional Implications Of State And Local Emergency Power, Karen Pita Loor

Faculty Scholarship

The President’s use of emergency authority has recently ignited concern among civil rights groups over national executive emergency power. However, state and local emergency authority can also be dangerous and deserves similar attention. This article demonstrates that, just as we watch over the national executive, we must be wary of and check on state and local executives — and their emergency management law enforcement actors — when they react in crisis mode. This paper exposes and critiques state executives’ use of emergency power and emergency management mechanisms to suppress grassroots political activity and suggests avenues to counter that abuse. I …

This Isn't Lochner, It's The First Amendment: Reorienting The Right To Contract And Commercial Speech, William French

Northwestern University Law Review

The commercial speech doctrine has long weathered accusations that it is simply an attempt to reinvigorate the laissez-faire protections provided by Lochner v. New York. The modern interpretation of Lochner is generally condemnatory, arguing that its “right to contract” is a symbol of the Supreme Court’s unprincipled decision to impose its own economic preferences upon the nation. Even though Lochnerism itself has been dead for nearly 100 years, some scholars believe that the First Amendment’s commercial speech doctrine is on its way to replicating the defenses provided by the right to contract. The argument goes that because speech pervades …

Revisiting Masterpiece Cakeshop - Free Speech And The First Amendment: Can Political Correctness Be Compelled, Terri R. Day

Hofstra Law Review

This Article questions whether religious objectors, who refuse to provide their services in facilitating a same-sex marriage, are discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation or refusing to adopt a politically correct, albeit legal, view of marriage. If the latter, then, compelling political correctness can have a boomerang effect, creating more LGBTQ discrimination. Given this administration's strong support for religious freedom and two new conservative justices on the Supreme Court, a legislative religious exemption in public accommodation laws may be safer for LGBTQ rights than risking a Supreme Court ruling constitutionally enshrining a religious right to discriminate.

After the Introduction …

A Dangerous Concoction: Pharmaceutical Marketing, Cognitive Biases, And First Amendment Overprotection, Cynthia M. Ho

Indiana Law Journal

Is more information always better? First Amendment commercial speech jurisprudence takes this as a given. However, when information is only available from a self-interested and marketing-savvy pharmaceutical company, more information may simply lead to more misinformation. Notably, doctors are also misled. This can result in public health harms when companies are promoting unapproved uses of prescription drugs that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved for other purposes—commonly referred to as “off-label” uses. Contrary to judicial presumptions, as well as the presumptions of some doctors and scholars, doctors are not sophisticated enough to always discern what is true versus …