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First Amendment Envelope Pushers: Revisiting The Incitement-To-Violence Test With Messrs. Brandenburg, Trump, & Spencer, Clay Calvert
First Amendment Envelope Pushers: Revisiting The Incitement-To-Violence Test With Messrs. Brandenburg, Trump, & Spencer, Clay Calvert
UF Law Faculty Publications
This Article examines weaknesses with the United States Supreme Court’s Brandenburg v. Ohio incitement test as its fiftieth anniversary approaches. A lawsuit targeting Donald Trump, as well as multiple cases pitting white nationalist Richard Spencer against public universities, provide timely springboards for analysis. Specifically, In re Trump: 1) illustrates difficulties in proving Brandenburg’s intent requirement via circumstantial evidence; and 2) exposes problems regarding the extent to which past violent responses to a person’s words satisfy Brandenburg’s likelihood element. Additionally, the Spencer lawsuits raise concerns about: 1) whether Brandenburg should serve as a prior restraint mechanism for blocking potential speakers …
How Not To Criminalize Cyberbullying, Lyrissa Barnett Lidsky, Andrea Garcia
How Not To Criminalize Cyberbullying, Lyrissa Barnett Lidsky, Andrea Garcia
UF Law Faculty Publications
This essay provides a sustained constitutional critique of the growing body of laws criminalizing cyberbullying. These laws typically proceed by either modernizing existing harassment and stalking laws or crafting new criminal offenses. Both paths are beset with First Amendment perils, which this essay illustrates through 'case studies' of selected legislative efforts. Though sympathetic to the aims of these new laws, this essay contends that reflexive criminalization in response to tragic cyberbullying incidents has led law-makers to conflate cyberbullying as a social problem with cyberbullying as a criminal problem, creating pernicious consequences. The legislative zeal to eradicate cyberbullying potentially produces disproportionate …