Law Commons^™

Nonsense And The Freedom Of Speech: What Meaning Means For The First Amendment, Joseph Blocher

Faculty Scholarship

A great deal of everyday expression is, strictly speaking, nonsense. But courts and scholars have done little to consider whether or why such meaningless speech, like nonrepresentational art, falls within “the freedom of speech.” If, as many suggest, meaning is what separates speech from sound and expression from conduct, then the constitutional case for nonsense is complicated. And because nonsense is so common, the case is also important — artists like Lewis Carroll and Jackson Pollock are not the only putative “speakers” who should be concerned about the outcome.

This Article is the first to explore thoroughly the relationship between …

Five Modern Notions In Search Of An Author: The Ideology Of The Intimate Society In Constitutional Speech Law, Marie Failinger

Faculty Scholarship

In this article, drawing heavily on the work of sociologist Richard Sennett, the author argues that the Court’s jurisprudence lends credence to, and exacerbates, five damaging “common sense” notions about American public social life: that public space and time are naked or empty, and can be imagined as no more than transportation tunnels or even the binoculars of a voyeur, as illustrated by the public forum doctrine; that massed acts of public communication, or “speech crowds” are dangerous and must be controlled by force, as the public forum and “clear and present danger” doctrines suggest; that “shadow” space for deviant …