First Amendment Commons^™

Paths Of Resistance To Our Imperial First Amendment, Bertrall L. Ross Ii

Michigan Law Review

In the campaign finance realm, we are in the age of the imperial First Amendment. Over the past nine years, litigants bringing First Amendment claims against campaign finance regulations have prevailed in every case in the Supreme Court. A conservative core of five justices has developed virtually categorical protections for campaign speech and has continued to expand those protections into domains that states once had the authority to regulate. As the First Amendment’s empire expands, other values give way. Four key cases from this era illustrate the reach of this imperial First Amendment. In Wisconsin Right to Life, Inc. v. …

Stubborn Things: An Empirical Approach To Facts, Opinions, And The First Amendment, Daniel E. Herz-Roiphe

Michigan Law Review First Impressions

This essay offers an empirical approach to the problem, rooted in an argument that the underlying rationale for the fact/opinion distinction in compelled speech doctrine tells us something about how this distinction should be policed. Commercial speech enjoys protection by virtue of its value to listeners, it is from the listener's vantage point, then, that courts should assess whether a compelled disclosure is fact or opinion. And if we are interested in learning how disclosures will affect listeners, we might try asking them, just as courts adjudicating trademark suits frequently use consumer surveys to determine how customers understand the meaning …

Fighting Foreign-Corporate Political Access: Applying Corporate Veil-Piercing Doctrine To Domestic-Subsidiary Contributions, Ryan Rott

Michigan Law Review

Campaign finance regulations limit speech. The laws preclude foreign nationals, including foreign corporations, from participating in U.S. politics via campaign contributions. The unusual characteristics of corporations, however, may allow foreign corporations to exploit a loophole in the regulatory regime. A foreign corporation may contribute to political campaigns by acquiring a domestic subsidiary and dominating it. This Note addresses how these unusual corporate behaviors enable foreign corporations to illegally corrupt the political process. This Note concludes that to close the loophole without violating the free speech rights of domestic subsidiaries, Congress should enact legislation which would apply corporate veil-piercing theory to …

Ethics For Media Lawyers: The Lessons Of Ferguson, Leonard M. Niehoff

Articles

Ferguson, Missouri, has a population of roughly 21,000 people. Thirty cities in Missouri have larger populations. The Edward Jones Dome, where the St. Louis Rams play football, seats three times as many people. Most of us had never heard of Ferguson prior to August 9, 2014, when a police oficer named Darren Wilson shot and killed an unarmed black teenager named Michael Brown. But, to paraphrase the grim observation of Ambrose Bierce, war is how Americans learn geography. So, as violence and vandalism erupted on its streets, the nation turned its attention toward Ferguson and labored to understand the place, …

The Right To Free Exercise Of Religion In Prisons: How Courts Should Determine Sincerity Of Religious Belief Under Rluipa, Noha Moustafa

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

Religion plays a vital role in the daily lives of many prisoners. For incarcerated persons, a connection to the divine can provide comfort during periods of isolation from their family and community. From a policy perspective, spiritual development and religious practice promote rehabilitation and reduce recidivism in inmates. While prisoners forfeit many of their civil liberties, Congress has ensured that religious exercise is not among them. As Congress enhanced religious freedom protections for prisoners, prison facilities became increasingly concerned that prisoners would feign religiosity to gain certain religious accommodations. To counter this concern, prison facilities conditioned accommodations on the sincerity …

A Disclosure-Focused Approach To Compelled Commercial Speech, Andrew C. Budzinski

Michigan Law Review

In 2010, the Food and Drug Administration passed a rule revising compelled disclaimers on tobacco products pursuant to the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act. The rule required that tobacco warnings include something new: all tobacco products now had to bear one of nine graphic images to accompany the text. Tobacco companies filed suit contesting the constitutionality of the rule, arguing that the government violated their right to free commercial speech by compelling disclosure of the graphic content. Yet First Amendment jurisprudence lacks a doctrinally consistent standard for reviewing such compelled disclosures. Courts’ analyses typically depend on whether the …

Globally Speaking—Honoring The Victims' Stories: Matsuda's Human Rights Praxis, Berta Esperanza Hernández-Truyol

Michigan Law Review First Impressions

Globally speaking, international law and the vast majority of domestic legal systems strive to protect the right to freedom of expression. The United States' First Amendment provides an early historical protection of speech-a safeguard now embraced around the world. The extent of this protection, however, varies among states. The United States stands alone in excluding countervailing considerations of equality, dignitary, or privacy interests that would favor restrictions on speech. The gravamen of the argument supporting such American exceptionalism is that free expression is necessary in a democracy. Totalitarianism, the libertarian narrative goes, thrives on government control of information to the …

The Tools Of Political Dissent: A First Amendment Guide To Gun Registries, Thomas E. Kadri

Michigan Law Review First Impressions

On December 23, 2012, a newspaper in upstate New York published a provocative map. On it appeared the names and addresses of thousands of gun owners in nearby counties, all precisely pinpointed for the world to browse. The source of this information: publicly available data drawn from the state’s gun registry. Legislators were quick to respond. Within a month, a new law offered gun owners the chance to permanently remove their identities from the registry with a simple call to their county clerk. The map raised interesting questions about broadcasting personal information, but a more fundamental question remains: Are these …

Institutional Autonomy And Constitutional Structure, Randy J. Kozel

Michigan Law Review

This Review makes two claims. The first is that Paul Horwitz’s excellent book, First Amendment Institutions, depicts the institutionalist movement in robust and provocative form. The second is that it would be a mistake to assume from its immersion in First Amendment jurisprudence (not to mention its title) that the book’s implications are limited to the First Amendment. Professor Horwitz presents First Amendment institutionalism as a wide-ranging theory of constitutional structure whose focus is as much on constraining the authority of political government as it is on facilitating expression. These are the terms on which the book’s argument — and, …

Is Religious Freedom Irrational?, Michael Stokes Paulsen

Michigan Law Review

Brian Leiter is almost exactly half right. There is no convincing secular-liberal argument for religious liberty, in the sense of unique accommodation of religious beliefs and practices specifically because they are religious. Indeed, from a thoroughgoing secularist perspective — from a stance of committed disbelief in the possible reality of God or religious truth, and perhaps also from the perspective of unswerving agnosticism — “toleration” of religion is almost intolerably foolish. Affirmatively protecting the free exercise of religion, in the strong sense of freedom of persons and groups to act on religious convictions in ways opposed to secular legal norms, …

Toward A Multiple Consciousness Of Language: A Tribute To Professor Mari Matsuda, Shannon Gilreath

Michigan Law Review First Impressions

I am thrilled to be part of this commemoration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of Professor Matsuda's influential article Public Response to Racist Speech: Considering the Victim's Story. I first read Matsuda's essay as a law student when, I must confess, the mind-numbing one-dimensionality of the law-as one must learn it in the prevailing method-drove me a little crazy. Law school is an environment where the Socratic method reduces people's stories-the stuff of which law is made-to something lawyers like to call "the facts," and where real-life people, in whom I saw so much of myself-people like Michael Hardwick, for example-get …

Zombies Among Us: Injunctions In Defamation Cases Come Back From The Dead, Jim Stewart, Leonard M. Niehoff

Articles

Here's a scary thought: an individual, unhappy with negative statements that have been made about him, sues for defamation and persuades the trial court to issue an injunction prohibiting the speaker from engaging in that speech again. An appellate court reviews the injunction and, in large measure, upholds it. This creepy scenario brings shudders to free speech and media advocates, who have long viewed such injunctions as prior restraints that the First Amendment forbids in all but the most extreme and extraordinary cases. As a recent decision from the Michigan Court of Appeals demonstrates, however, decades of United States Supreme …

The Unrelenting Libertarian Challenge To Public Accommodations Law, Samuel R. Bagenstos

Articles

There seems to be a broad consensus that Title II of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits race discrimination in “place[s] of public accommodation,” was a remarkable success. But the consensus is illusory. Laws prohibiting discrimination by public accommodations currently exist under a significant legal threat. And this threat is merely the latest iteration in the controversy over public accommodations laws that began as early as Reconstruction. This Article begins by discussing the controversy in the Reconstruction and Civil Rights Eras over the penetration of antidiscrimination principles into the realm of private businesses’ choice of customers. Although the …

Fumbling The First Amendment: The Right Of Publicity Goes 2-0 Against Freedom Of Expression, Thomas E. Kadri

Michigan Law Review

Two circuits in one summer found in favor of college athletes in right-of-publicity suits filed against the makers of the NCAA Football videogame. Both panels split 2–1; both applied the transformative use test; both dissenters predicted chilling consequences. By insisting that the likeness of each player be “transformed,” the Third and Ninth Circuits employed a test that imperils the use of realistic depictions of public figures in expressive works. This standard could have frosty implications for artists in a range of media: docudramas, biographies, and works of historical fiction may be at risk. This Comment examines the tension between the …

Material Falsity In Defamation Cases: The Supreme Court's Call For Contextual Analysis, Charles D. Tobin, Leonard M. Niehoff

Articles

In the book The Phantom Tollbooth, one of the characters, Milo, declares that he comes from a faraway land called Context. After a circuitous journey through many strange cities, bearing names that have meanings Milo struggles to understand, he finds himself back at home in his bedroom.

Context, by and large, is the home base for courts in defining the boundaries between actionable and nonactionable speech. Often, after circuitous travels through precedent and logic, courts meander back to the simple notion that the meaning and legal significance of words are determined by their context.

Hobby Lobby And The Pathology Of Citizens United, Ellen D. Katz

Articles

Four years ago, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission held that for-profit corporations possess a First Amendment right to make independent campaign expenditures. In so doing, the United States Supreme Court invited speculation that such corporations might possess other First Amendment rights as well. The petitioners in Conestoga Wood Specialties Corp. v. Sebelius are now arguing that for-profit corporations are among the intended beneficiaries of the Free Exercise Clause and, along with the respondents in Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby Stores, that they also qualify as “persons” under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA). Neither suggestion follows inexorably from Citizens United, …

Tollbooths And Newsstands On The Information Superhighway, Brad A. Greenberg

Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review

Countering the perception that speech limitations affecting distribution necessarily reduce access to information, this Essay proffers that copyright expansions actually can increase access and thereby serve important copyright and First Amendment values. In doing so, this discussion contributes to the growing literature and two recent Supreme Court opinions discussing whether copyright law and First Amendment interests can coexist.

Getting Down To (Tattoo) Business: Copyright Norms And Speech Protections For Tattooing, Alexa L. Nickow

Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review

What level of First Amendment protection should we afford tattooing? General public consensus formerly condemned tattoos as barbaric, but the increasingly diverse clientele of tattoo shops suggests that tattoos have become more mainstream. However, the law has struggled to adjust. The recent proliferation of municipal near-bans on tattooing has brought tattooing to the forefront of First Amendment debates, with cases such as Anderson and Coleman leading the way toward recognizing tattooing as pure speech. Tensions between formal and informal copyright norms in the tattoo industry further highlight the collaborative and expressive nature of the artist-customer relationship and its resulting products, …

Pro-Whistleblower Reform In The Post-Garcetti Era, Julian W. Kleinbrodt

Michigan Law Review

Whistleblowers who expose government ineptitude, inefficiency, and corruption are valuable assets to a well-functioning democracy. Until recently, the Connick–Pickering test governed public employee speech law; it gave First Amendment protection to government employees who spoke on matters of public concern—-such as whistleblowers-—so long as the government’s administrative concerns did not outweigh the employees’ free speech interests. The Supreme Court significantly curtailed the protection of such speech in its recent case, Garcetti v. Ceballos. This case created a categorical threshold requirement that afforded no protection to speech made as an employee rather than as a citizen. Garcetti’s problematic rule has forced …

Rethinking Reporter's Privilege, Ronnell Andersen Jones

Michigan Law Review

Forty years ago, in Branzburg v. Hayes, the Supreme Court made its first and only inquiry into the constitutional protection of the relationship between a reporter and a confidential source. This case - decided at a moment in American history in which the role of an investigative press, and of information provided by confidential sources, was coming to the forefront of public consciousness in a new and significant way - produced a reporter-focused "privilege" that is now widely regarded to be both doctrinally questionable and deeply inconsistent in application. Although the post-Branzburg privilege has been recognized as flawed in a …

Policeman, Citizen, Or Both? A Civilian Analogue Exception To Garcetti V. Ceballos, Caroline A. Flynn

Michigan Law Review

The First Amendment prohibits the government from leveraging its employment relationship with a public employee in order to silence the employee's speech. But the Supreme Court dramatically curtailed this right in Garcetti v. Ceballos by installing a categorical bar: if the public employee spoke "pursuant to her official duties," her First Amendment retaliation claim cannot proceed. Garcetti requires the employee to show that she was speaking entirely "as a citizen" and not at all "as an employee." But this is a false dichotomy - especially because the value of the employee's speech to the public is no less if she …

Commercial Speech In Crisis: Crisis Pregnancy Center Regulations And Definitions Of Commercial Speech, Kathryn E. Gilbert

Michigan Law Review

Recent attempts to regulate Crisis Pregnancy Centers, pseudoclinics that surreptitiously aim to dissuade pregnant women from choosing abortion, have confronted the thorny problem of how to define commercial speech. The Supreme Court has offered three potential answers to this definitional quandary. This Note uses the Crisis Pregnancy Center cases to demonstrate that courts should use one of these solutions, the factor-based approach of Bolger v. Youngs Drugs Products Corp., to define commercial speech in the Crisis Pregnancy Center cases and elsewhere. In principle and in application, the Bolger factor-based approach succeeds in structuring commercial speech analysis at the margins of …

Outing The Majority: Gay Rights, Public Debate, And Polarization After Doe V. Reed, Marc Allen

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

In 2010, the United States Supreme Court ruled in Doe v. Reed that Washington citizens who signed a petition to eliminate legal rights for LGBT couples did not have a right to keep their names secret. A year later, in ProtectMarriage.com v. Bowen, a district court in California partially relied on Reed to reject a similar request from groups who lobbied for California Proposition 8-a constitutional amendment that overturned the California Supreme Court's landmark 2008 gay marriage decision. These holdings are important to election law, feminist, and first amendment scholars for a number of reasons. First, they flip the traditional …

Baring Inequality: Revisiting The Legalization Debate Through The Lens Of Strippers' Rights, Sheerine Alemzadeh

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

The debate over legalization of prostitution has fractured the feminist legal community for over a quarter century. Pro-legalization advocates promote the benefits attending government regulation of prostitution, including the ability to better prosecute sex crimes, increase public health and educational resources for individuals in the commercial sex trade, and apply labor and safety regulations to the commercial sex industry in the same manner as they are applied to other businesses. Some anti-legalization advocates identify themselves as "new abolitionists," and argue that government recognition of prostitution reinforces gender inequality. Often, this debate is framed in the hypothetical: What would happen if …

The North Carolina Woman’S Right To Know Act: An Unconstitutional Infringement On A Physician’S First Amendment Right To Free Speech, Ryan Bakelaar

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

The North Carolina Woman’s Right to Know Act represents the crossroads of the Supreme Court’s First Amendment, informed consent, and abortion-related jurisprudence. The Act requires physicians to perform an obstetric ultrasound, verbally convey specific information regarding ultrasonographic findings, and communicate a host of other information to patients seeking abortions. The purported goal of the Act is to ensure that physicians obtain appropriate informed consent from such patients. By compelling a physician to convey this information, the State violates the physician’s First Amendment rights. Indeed, the State may not compel an individual to convey the State’s ideological message. Further, any statute …

Three Puzzling Things About New York Times V. Sullivan: Beginning The Anniversary Conversation, Leonard M. Niehoff

Articles

This is the 50th anniversary of a watershed year in the history of the civil rights movement. During that year, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference mounted its anti-segregation campaign in Alabama; Commissioner "Bull" Connor turned dogs and fire hoses on demonstrators; activists were attacked; riots flared; George Wallace blocked the doors of a public university to keep black students out; President Kennedy dispatched troops to Alabama and called for the passage of a civil rights bill; Medgar Evers was murdered; the then-largest human rights demonstration in U.S. history converged on Washington; Martin Luther King Jr. gave his historic speech at …

Graffiti Museum: A First Amendment Argument For Protecting Uncommissioned Art On Private Property, Margaret L. Mettler

Michigan Law Review

Graffiti has long been a target of municipal legislation that aims to preserve property values, public safety, and aesthetic integrity in the community. Not only are graffitists at risk of criminal prosecution but property owners are subject to civil and criminal penalties for harboring graffiti on their land. Since the 1990s, most U.S. cities have promulgated graffiti abatement ordinances that require private property owners to remove graffiti from their land, often at their own expense. These ordinances define graffiti broadly to include essentially any surface marking applied without advance authorization from the property owner. Meanwhile, graffiti has risen in prominence …

Environmental Aesthetics And Free Speech: Toward A Consistent Content Neutrality Standard For Outdoor Sign Regulation , Brian J. Connolly

Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law

First Amendment challenges by billboard companies and other sign owners to local sign regulations have become a frequent occurrence in the past thirty years. The stakes are high for both commercial sign owners and local governments. Sign control has emerged as an important front in the environmental protection movement, as it focuses on the visual or scenic quality of the environment. Courts have begun to recognize and accept local governments’ interest in controlling the proliferation of signage as part of their efforts to improve environmental quality, but courts have applied First Amendment doctrine in an inconsistent manner. The courts’ inconsistent …

Ideology 'All The Way Down'? An Empirical Study Of Establishment Clause Decisions In The Federal Courts, Gregory C. Sisk, Michael Heise

Michigan Law Review

As part of our ongoing empirical examination of religious liberty decisions in the lower federal courts, we studied Establishment Clause rulings by federal court of appeals and district court judges from 1996 through 2005. The powerful role of political factors in Establishment Clause decisions appears undeniable and substantial, whether celebrated as the proper integration of political and moral reasoning into constitutional judging, shrugged off as mere realism about judges being motivated to promote their political attitudes, or deprecated as a troubling departure from the aspirational ideal of neutral and impartial judging. In the context of Church and State cases in …

Towards A Balanced Approach For The Protection Of Native American Sacred Sites, Alex Tallchief Skibine

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

Protection of "sacred sites" is very important to Native American religious practitioners because it is intrinsically tied to the survival of their cultures, and therefore to their survival as distinct peoples. The Supreme Court in Oregon v. Smith held that rational basis review, and not strict scrutiny, was the appropriate level of judicial review when evaluating the constitutionality of neutral laws of general applicability even when these laws impacted one's ability to practice a religion. Reacting to the decision, Congress enacted the Relgious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), which reinstated the strict scrutiny test for challenges to neutral laws of general …