Law Commons^™

The Terrorist's Veto: Why The First Amendment Must Protect Provocative Portrayals Of The Prophet Muhammad, Daniel Ortner

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

No abstract provided.

Drawing The Line For Democratic Choice: How The Petition Clause Can Restore A Citizen’S Right To Participate In Commission-Driven Redistricting, Mateo Forero

Indiana Journal of Law and Social Equality

In this Article, I argue that commission-driven redistricting (and the “apolitical” process enshrined therein) frustrates a citizen’s right to meaningfully participate in electoral design. This right is fundamental, and has long been safeguarded by the First Amendment’s assertion that “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging . . . the right of the people . . . to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” Accordingly, I propose that courts use the Petition Clause as a constitutional remedy against rules that abridge substantive public input in commission-driven redistricting. To illustrate this claim, I analyze how one commonly …

Charities And Lobbying: Institutional Rights In The Wake Of Citizens United, Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer

Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer

One of the many aftershocks of the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Citizens United v. FEC is that the decision may raise constitutional questions for the long-standing limits on speech by charities. There has been much scholarly attention both before and after that decision on the limit for election-related speech by charities, but much less attention has been paid to the relating lobbying speech limit. This article seeks to close that gap by exploring that latter limit and its continued viability in the wake of Citizens United. I conclude that while Citizens United by itself does not undermine the limit …

Politics At The Pulpit: Tax Benefits, Substantial Burdens, And Institutional Free Exercise, Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer

Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer

More than fifty years ago, Congress enacted a prohibition against political campaign intervention for all charities, including churches and other houses of worship, as a condition for receiving tax deductible contributions. Yet the IRS has never taken a house of worship to court for alleged violation of the prohibition through political comments from the pulpit, presumably at least in part because of concerns about the constitutionality of doing so. This decision is surprising, because a careful review of Free Exercise Clause case law - both before and after the landmark Employment Division v. Smith decision - reveals that the prohibition …

Charities And Lobbying: Institutional Rights In The Wake Of Citizens United, Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer

Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer

One of the many aftershocks of the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Citizens United v. FEC is that the decision may raise constitutional questions for the long-standing limits on speech by charities. There has been much scholarly attention both before and after that decision on the limit for election-related speech by charities, but much less attention has been paid to the relating lobbying speech limit. This article seeks to close that gap by exploring that latter limit and its continued viability in the wake of Citizens United. I conclude that while Citizens United by itself does not undermine the limit …

Pornography As Pollution, John C. Nagle

John Copeland Nagle

Pornography is often compared to pollution. But little effort has been made to consider what it means to describe pornography as a pollution problem, even as many legal scholars have concluded that the law has failed to control internet pornography. Opponents of pornography maintain passionate convictions about how sexually-explicit materials harm both those who are exposed to them and the broader cultural environment. Viewers of pornography may generally hold less fervent beliefs, but champions of free speech and of a free internet object to anti-pornography regulations with strong convictions of their own. The challenge is how to address the widespread …

Testimony On Unmanned Aircraft Systems Rules And Regulations, Stephen E. Henderson

Stephen E Henderson

Grand Theory Or Discrete Proposal? Religious Accommodations And Health Related Harms, James M. Oleske Jr.

Washington and Lee Law Review Online

More than a quarter-century has passed since the Supreme Court decided in Employment Division v. Smith that religious accommodations are primarily a matter of legislative grace, not constitutional right. In that time, barrels of ink have been spilled over the merits of the Smith decision. But comparatively little attention has been given to the issue of how legislatures and other political actors should exercise their discretion to grant or deny specific religious accommodations. In their article To Accommodate or Not to Accommodate: (When) Should the State Regulate Religion to Protect the Rights of Children and Third Parties?, Professor Hillel …

Disaggregating Corpus Christi: The Illiberal Implications Of Hobby Lobby's Right To Free Exercise, Katharine Jackson

Katharine Jackson

This paper first examines and critiques the group rights to religious exercise derived from the three ontologies of the corporation suggested by different legal conceptions of corporate personhood often invoked by Courts. Finding the implicated groups rights inimical to individual religious freedom, the paper then presents an argument as to why a discourse of intra-corporate toleration and voluntariness does a better job at protecting religious liberty.

State & Federal Religious Accommodation Bills: Overview Of The 2015-2016 Legislative Session, Public Rights/Private Conscience Project

Center for Gender & Sexuality Law

Since the Supreme Court’s 2015 decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, which held that laws limiting marriage to opposite-sex couples were unconstitutional, opponents of marriage equality and LGBT rights have largely turned their attention to the enactment of religious exemption laws. These exemptions allow individuals and organizations to violate certain federal, state, and local laws and regulations that conflict with their religious faith. While some proposed bills are state-level variations on the extremely broad and general federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), passed in 1993, a new variety of legislation provides narrower accommodations specifically relating to religious views about sex, …

Tinker, Taylor, Schoolhouse, Speech: The Impact Of The Internet And Social Media On Public School Administrators’ Authority To Control Student Speech, Olivia Broderick

Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice

No abstract provided.

Professional Speech And The First Amendment, Rodney A. Smolla

West Virginia Law Review

No abstract provided.

The “Ample Alternative Channels” Flaw In First Amendment Doctrine, Enrique Armijo

Washington and Lee Law Review

In reviewing a content-neutral regulation affecting speech, courts ask if the regulation leaves open “ample alternative channels of communication” for the restricted speaker’s expression. Substitutability is the underlying rationale. If the message could have been expressed in some other legal way, the ample alternative channels requirement is met. The court then deems the restriction’s harm to the speaker’s expressive right as de minimis and upholds the law. For decades, courts and free speech scholars have assumed the validity of this principle. It has set First Amendment jurisprudence on the wrong course. Permitting a speech restriction because the speaker could have …

Free Speech And Parity: A Theory Of Public Employee Rights, Randy J. Kozel

Randy J Kozel

More than four decades have passed since the U.S. Supreme Court revolutionized the First Amendment rights of the public workforce. In the ensuing years the Court has embarked upon an ambitious quest to protect expressive liberties while facilitating orderly and efficient government. Yet it has never articulated an adequate theoretical framework to guide its jurisprudence. This Article suggests a conceptual reorientation of the modern doctrine. The proposal flows naturally from the Court’s rejection of its former view that one who accepts a government job has no constitutional right to complain about its conditions. As a result of that rejection, the …

Payment Finality And Discharge In Funds Transfers, Benjamin Geva

Benjamin Geva

The article explores the occurrence of "final payment" in funds transfers in the form of "accountability" by a bank instructed to pay to a payee/beneficiary. Both the accountability of the drawee/payor bank in a check-collection debit-pull system and that of the beneficiary's bank in a wire-transfer credit-push system are discussed. The article further examines the relationship between "final payment" and the discharge of an obligation paid by means of the "funds transfer." It analyzes relevant provisions of Articles 3, 4, and 4A of the Uniform Commercial Code, sometimes against the background of general common law principles. The article proposes minor …

Virtue, Freedom, And The First Amendment, Marc O. Degirolami

Notre Dame Law Review

The modern First Amendment embodies the idea of freedom as a fundamental good of contemporary American society. The First Amendment protects and promotes everybody’s freedom of thought, belief, speech, and religious exercise as basic goods—as given ends of American political and moral life. It does not protect these freedoms for the sake of promoting any particular vision of the virtuous society. It is neutral on that score, setting limits only in those rare cases when the exercise of a First Amendment freedom exacts an intolerable social cost. The Article concludes with two speculations. First, it seems we are no longer …

Pleading Actual Malice In Defamation Actions After Twiqbal: A Circuit Survey, Judy M. Cornett

Nevada Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Is Social Media The New Era’S “Water Cooler”? #Notifyouareagovernmentemployee, Sabrina Niewialkouski

University of Miami Law Review

Current Free Speech doctrine does not sufficiently protect government employees’ First Amendment rights. There are two major flaws in the test implemented by the Supreme Court in order to find whether the First Amendment protects an employee. First, the Garcetti test, where a government employee loses First Amendment protection if her speech is pursuant to her official duty, is inadequate, overbroad, and should be done away with completely – or at the least interpreted more narrowly. Secondly, the Pickering balancing test is less of a balancing and more of a prioritization of the government’s interests and should be interpreted to …

Panel Iii: Trademarks V. Free Speech In Cyberspace, Sonia Katyal, Robert Weisbein, William Mcgeveran, Brett Frischmann

Sonia Katyal

No abstract provided.

Time, Place, And Manner Restrictions For Firearms: What The First Amendment Can Tell Us About The Future Of Second Amendment Jurisprudence, Jarom Harrison

Brigham Young University Prelaw Review

No abstract provided.

To Accommodate Or Not To Accommodate: (When) Should The State Regulate Religion To Protect The Rights Of Children And Third Parties?, Hillel Y. Levin, Allan J. Jacobs, Kavita Shah Arora

Washington and Lee Law Review

When should we accommodate religious practices? When should we demand that religious groups instead conform to social or legal norms? Who should make these decisions, and how? These questions lie at the very heart of our contemporary debates in the field of Law and Religion.

Particularly thorny issues arise where religious practices may impose health-related harm to children within a religious group or to third parties. Unfortunately, legislators, courts, scholars, ethicists, and medical practitioners have not offered a consistent way to analyze such cases, so the law is inconsistent. This Article suggests, first, that the lack of consistency is a …

Lawyer Speech In The Regulatory State, Renee Newman Knake

Fordham Law Review

A lawyer’s speech as advisor and advocate not only holds First Amendment value for the client and for the public, but also for the functioning of American democracy. This is supported both by foundational values undergirding the First Amendment as well as Supreme Court doctrine. This Article builds upon that analysis to posit that lawyers for the regulatory state ought not to be treated as government employees for purposes of the First Amendment when engaged in speech about workplace conditions related to curbing abuse of power, corruption, or other illegality. While this position runs counter to the existing precedent of …

If Hip-Hop Were Classified And The Pentagon Papers Had Been Copyrighted: An Analysis Of Whether The Fair Use Defense In Copyright Law Is Broad Enough To Protect First Amendment Concerns, Sean Buchanan

Akron Intellectual Property Journal

This paper will show that copyright law conflicts with the First Amendment in that the fair use doctrine is insufficient to protect the fundamental rights and interests that underlie the First Amendment's protection of speech. To do this, the paper will examine three primary justifications of the First Amendment: individual liberty, the marketplace of ideas, and political participation. The paper will also analyze multiple situations, in which parties bring copyright suits and the defendants claim fair use, to determine whether the fair use doctrine protects the First Amendment. This paper will show that if one accepts either a marketplace of …

Reconciling The "Moral Rights" Of Authors With The First Amendment Right Of Free Speech, John T. Cross

Akron Intellectual Property Journal

The article concludes that the First Amendment does not significantly limit the enforcement of those moral rights recognized by state and federal law. Several features of moral rights laws support this conclusion. First, many acts that infringe moral rights do not qualify as speech, and therefore receive no First Amendment protection. For example, the droit de suite, or resale right, is clearly constitutional under this rationale, as it involves no speech whatsoever. Second, even when the offending act is speech, most moral rights laws can be justified, depending on the circumstances, by one or more of several arguments. Indeed, many …

Master Metaphors And Double-Coding In The Encounters Of Religion And State, Perry Dane

San Diego Law Review

That term “existential encounter” is meant to convey several important ideas. First, it suggests that what is at stake here is not merely a set of legal doctrines or policy prescriptions, but something deeper and more constitutive. The sovereign nation-state, in some sense, looks out at the world around it and sees other entities that do not easily fit into its own internal sovereign architecture. Some of these are other nation-states. Some might be other types of essentially secular, but non-state, human associations. And others are, or should be, communities—large and small, organized or not, united or splintered—whose normative commitment …

Religion In The Public Square, H.E. Baber

San Diego Law Review

The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution both prohibits the establishment of religion and guarantees its free exercise. There is, however, a tension between the Free Exercise Clause and the Establishment Clause, which has been understood to erect a “wall of separation” between church and state. Prima facie, the Establishment Clause prohibits the state from providing special benefits to institutions or individuals in virtue of their religious affiliations or convictions. The Free Exercise Clause, however, is cited in support of accommodations for individuals who, because of their religious commitments, cannot in good conscience conform to laws or regulations. This seems …

Gone But Not Forgotten: Recognizing The Right To Be Forgotten In The U.S. To Lessen The Impacts Of Data Breaches, Ashley Stenning

San Diego International Law Journal

This Comment will explore the right to be forgotten, how it is recognized in the European Union, and the trend toward the existence of such a right in the United States. Additionally, this comment will discuss how the right to be forgotten could lessen the impact data breaches have on individuals through the lens of the Ashley Madison hack. Lastly, this comment will discuss how, if the United States narrowed the scope of the European Union’s concept of the right to be forgotten to fit into the United States’ view of privacy and the First Amendment, the impact of data …

Do Religious Exemptions Save?, Maimon Schwarzschild

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Binding The Enforcers: The Administrative Law Struggle Behind Pres. Obama’S Immigration Actions, Michael Kagan

Scholarly Works

President Obama’s ambitious use of executive discretion in immigration – especially the DACA and DAPA programs – should be understood in context of a struggle within the executive branch between the President and frontline enforcement officers in the Department of Homeland Security who have actively resisted his policy agenda. The so far successful litigation by 26 states to partially halt these programs has focused on this struggle within the executive branch, rather than on the stalemate between the President and Congress over legislative immigration reform. In preliminary rulings, the federal district court and the Court of Appeals have interpreted ambiguous …

Politics At Work After Citizens United, Ruben J. Garcia

Scholarly Works

There are seismic changes going on in the political system. The United States Supreme Court has constitutionalized the concentration of political power in the "one percent" in several recent decisions, including Citizens United v. FEC. At the same time, unions are representing a shrinking share of the workforce, and their political power is also being diminished. In order for unions to recalibrate the balance of political power at all, they must collaborate with grassroots community groups, as they have done in several recent campaigns. There are, however, various legal structures that make coordination between unions and nonunion groups difficult, …