First Amendment Commons^™

Rethinking Media Liability For Defamation Of Public Figures, John L. Diamond

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Viewpoints From Olympus, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

This Essay examines the Supreme Court's treatment of content and viewpoint discrimination in Rosenberger v. Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia. In that opinion, the Court adopted a very expansive approach to what constitutes viewpoint discrimination, the form of content discrimination most disfavored by the Constitution. The Court held that a public university could not decline to fund publication of Wide Awake, a magazine devoted to proselytizing for Christianity, if it funded other student publications. Justice Kennedy's opinion for the Court accepted the argument of the sponsors of Wide Awake that the University had engaged in …

Cowboys, Camels, And The First Amendment: The Fda's Restrictions On Tobacco Advertising, George J. Annas

Faculty Scholarship

The Marlboro Man and Joe Camel have become public health enemies number one and two, and removing their familiar faces from the gaze of young people has become a goal of President Bill Clinton and his health care officials. The strategy of limiting the exposure of children to tobacco advertisements is based on the fact that almost all regular smokers begin smoking in their teens. This approach is politically possible because most Americans believe that tobacco companies should be prohibited from targeting children in their advertising.

Implications Of Mill's Theory Of Liberty For The Regulation Of Hate Speech And Hate Crimes, Keith N. Hylton

Faculty Scholarship

The notion that utilitarianism cannot support a theory of fundamental rights is a recurring source of conflict in law and philosophy.' Those who adhere to this view argue that a utilitarian or consequentialist approach cannot provide a stable, permanent justification for rights: at any moment, the utilitarian calculus might conclude that what it considered a right yesterday, actually reduces total welfare, and therefore is not a right today. Perhaps no one has gone further in attempting to refute this claim than John Stuart Mill.' As a result, any effort to construct a consequentialist theory of fundamental rights must draw at …

John Milton's Areopagitica And The Modern First Amendment, Vincent A. Blasi

Faculty Scholarship

The traditional liberal argument for free speech is now under fire from several directions. Critics from the left, the center, and the right find simplistic the claim that unregulated expression promotes the search for truth, the protection of self-government, the autonomy of individuals, and the control of concentrated power. Even if free speech does serve these values to a considerable degree, there are costs associated with liberty, costs the critics say are not sufficiently recognized in the standard liberal accounts.

As a general matter, but especially regarding the freedom of speech, liberalism is seen as too doctrinaire, too optimistic about …

Of Markets And Media: The First Amendment, The New Mass Media And The Political Components Of Culture, Ashutosh Bhagwat

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Ironic State Of Religious Liberty In America, Frederick Mark Gedicks

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Public Institutions Of Culture And The First Amendment: The New Frontier, Lee C. Bollinger

Faculty Scholarship

The general subject of my lecture today is the relationship between the First Amendment and public institutions of culture, which I take to be those sponsored and supported by the state with the clear purpose of preserving and promoting high culture in the United States. These include universities, museums, theaters, libraries, public broadcasting networks, programs for art in public places, and the national endowments for the arts and the humanities. All of these institutions or programs are vested with the responsibility of insuring the preservation of high human achievement in the areas to which they are devoted (knowledge, art, music, …

Free Speech And The Widening Gyre Of Fund-Raising: Why Campaign Spending Limits May Not Violate The First Amendment After All Symposium On Campaign Finance Reform, Vincent A. Blasi

Faculty Scholarship

Candidates for office spend too much of their time raising money. This is scarcely a controversial proposition. A major impetus for campaign finance reform is the frustration politicians now feel concerning how much time they must devote to courting potential donors, often by methods borrowed from the marketplace that can only be described as demeaning. The situation has gotten worse as electoral merchandising has grown ever more sophisticated and expensive.

The Pc Harangue, James Boyle

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Constitutional Adventures In Wonderland: Exploring The Debate Between Rules And Standards Through The Looking Glass Of The First Amendment, David L. Faigman

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

On The Brink: The First Amendment In The Rehnquist Court, 1990-91 Term, Joel Gora

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Tort Liability For Physical Injuries Allegedly Resulting From Media Speech: A Comprehensive First Amendment Approach , Andrew B. Sims

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

A Constitutional Right Of Religious Exemption: An Historical Perspective, Philip A. Hamburger

Faculty Scholarship

Did late eighteenth-century Americans understand the Free Exercise Clause of the United States Constitution to provide individuals a right of exemption from civil laws to which they had religious objections? Claims of exemption based on the Free Exercise Clause have prompted some of the Supreme Court's most prominent free exercise decisions, and therefore this historical inquiry about a right of exemption may have implications for our constitutional jurisprudence. Even if the Court does not adopt late eighteenth-century ideas about the free exercise of religion, we may, nonetheless, find that the history of such ideas can contribute to our contemporary analysis. …

Six Conservatives In Search Of The First Amendment: The Revealing Case Of Nude Dancing, Vincent A. Blasi

Faculty Scholarship

The future of political freedom in the United States hardly turns on whether women have a First Amendment right to dance in the nude in bars and peep shows. The future of artistic freedom is perhaps implicated by this question, but only if the law's demand for general principle prohibits judges from treating expressive nudity in those environments as fundamentally different from expressive nudity in ballet performances, museum exhibitions, and films. Barnes v. Glen Theatre, Inc. is an interesting and potentially important case not because of the significance of the specific issue it decided, but because it provoked a lively …

The End Of New York Times V Sullivan: Reflections On Masson V New Yorker Magazine, Lee C. Bollinger

Faculty Scholarship

Virtually every year since New York Times v Sullivan, the Supreme Court has decided at least one or two First Amendment cases involving the press. This now seemingly permanent, annual pageant of media cases undoubtedly has significance for the development of both constitutional law and the character of American journalism, though oddly that significance has been little explored in the scholarly literature. This past year the Court had two cases, both of which received an unusual amount of discussion within the press. It is, of course, understandable, even if not wholly defensible, for the press to give disproportionate coverage …

Foreword, Lee C. Bollinger

Faculty Scholarship

The mass media are too important to American democracy, too capable of causing injury, and too easy a target for the perennial wish to find a scapegoat for the country's ills ever to be very far from the center of public attention and debate. That is certainly true today. And, though every generation probably thinks that it stands at a crossroads on the question what to do with the media, I would nevertheless venture to say that the issues of our time are more serious, and more complex, than ever before. One can safely predict, in any event, that we …

Free Speech In The United States And Canada, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

This comparison of freedom of speech in the United States and Canada concentrates on Supreme Court decisions in the two countries and on kinds of speech mainly engaged in by extreme dissenters and political outsiders. After brief comments about constitutional language and general approaches, I discuss subversive speech and other speech that encourages criminal acts, hate speech, symbolic speech, and public demonstrations.

In both countries, a major premise of modern adjudication is that freedom of expression is a central feature of liberal democracy. Government "by the people," even in the extended sense of government by representatives, requires that citizens openly …

Rouge Et Noir Reread: A Popular Constitutional History Of The Angelo Herndon Case, Kendall Thomas

Faculty Scholarship

In 1932, Eugene Angelo Braxton Hemdon, a young Afro-American member of the Communist Party, U.S.A., was arrested in Atlanta and charged with an attempt to incite insurrection against that state's lawful authority. Some five years later, in Herndon v. Lowry, Herndon filed a writ of habeas corpus asking the U.S. Supreme Court to consider the constitutionality of the Georgia statute under which he had been convicted. Two weeks before his twenty-fourth birthday, the Court, voting 5-4, declared the use of the Georgia political-crimes statute against him unconstitutional on the grounds that it deprived Herndon of his rights to freedom …

The First Amendment At Home And Abroad, Pnina Lahav

Faculty Scholarship

The powerful appeal of the First Amendment flows from the rhetoric it has inspired. Holmes's "[W]hen men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe ... that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market"; Brandeis's " ... the greatest menace to freedom is an inert people; ... order cannot be secured merely through fear of punishment for its infraction; ... it is hazardous to discourage thought, hope and imagination; fear breeds repression; ... repression breeds hate; ... hate menaces stable …

Allocating The Costs Of Parental Free Exercise : Striking A New Balance Between Sincere Religious Belief And A Child's Right To Medical Treatment, Paula A. Monopoli

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Meaning Of Dissent, Lee C. Bollinger

Faculty Scholarship

There is, and has always been, an abiding tension in first amendment theory. At times, freedom of speech is conceived as having a very practical purpose – as implementing a system designed for yielding truth, or good public policy. Thus, Zechariah Chafee wrote that the first amendment protects the "social interest in the attainment of truth, so that the country may not only adopt the wisest course of action but carry it out in the wisest way," and Alexander Meiklejohn spoke frequently of the first amendment as a practical plan for a self-governing society, engendering "wise decisions." This vision of …

A Judicial Postscript To The Church-State Debates Of 1989: How Porous The Wall, How Civil The State?, William W. Van Alstyne

Faculty Scholarship

This work is a continuation of the debate regarding the Establishment Clause. The focus lies with Justice O’Connor’s concurrence in County of Allegheny v. ACLU and how this opinion harkens back to a concept shared by Jefferson and Madison, that the establishment clause is designed to prevent government favoritism.

Insults And Epithets: Are They Protected Speech?, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

It is a privilege to offer a lecture in this series named for Edward J. Bloustein. Not many lecture series honor sitting university presidents who deliver the first lecture in the series; but President Bloustein is the very rare president whose long tenure in office has been accompanied by continuing academic productivity. That achievement is remarkable.

When I tentatively chose this topic a year ago, I knew it involved the application of philosophical insights to serious practical questions, the kind of work that President Bloustein has done so well. I also knew that the search for those aspects of human …

The Tolerant Society: A Response To Critics, Lee C. Bollinger

Faculty Scholarship

In writing The Tolerant Society I was, and yet remain, interested in the treatment of speech behavior in this country, a treatment notably more liberal than in other Western democracies. Liberality, however, is not its only surprising or distinguishing hallmark; so too is how the world is characterized under the free speech concept.

For some time, even after I began teaching in the first amendment area, the scope and nature of protection afforded speech seemed to me obviously right. But the more I thought about it, the more it seemed to me quite extraordinary. Existing free speech theory provided less …

O'Er The Land Of The Free: Flag Burning As Speech, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

I am honored to lecture at this school, which has a number of friends, and a much larger circle of scholars whose work I admire. I am honored to lecture in the memory of Melville Nimmer, one of the country's leading thinkers on freedom of speech as well as its foremost expert on copyright. I met Professor Nimmer only once, at a lunch with Vince Blasi. My recollection of the lunch is distinct. Gently and in the most friendly way, but with irrefutable logic, they showed me that a position I had held for more than a decade about immigration …

Learned Hand And The Self-Government Theory Of The First Amendment: Masses Publishing Co. V. Patten, Vincent A. Blasi

Faculty Scholarship

Sitting as a federal district judge in the case of Masses Publishing Co. v. Patten, Learned Hand was called upon to interpret the Espionage Act of 1917 just six weeks after its passage. The Act was potentially the most speech-restrictive piece of federal legislation since the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798. Judge Hand recognized this and ruled that the terms of the Act must be construed in light of the first amendment. He defined the limits of legally protected war criticism, and presumably of political advocacy generally, according to a test that makes the crucial consideration the content of …

By What Authority?: Reflections On The Constitutionality And Wisdom Of The Flag Protection Act Of 1989, David L. Faigman

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Pure Symbols And The First Amendment, Calvin R. Massey

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Introduction: Third Abraham L. Pomerantz Lecture: The First Amendment And Government Regulation Of Economic Markets, Roberta S. Karmel

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.