First Amendment Commons^™

Fueling The Terrorist Fires With The First Amendment: Religious Freedom, The Anti-Lgbt Right, And Interest Convergence Theory, Kyle C. Velte

Brooklyn Law Review

This article argues that there is a connection between formal equality for LGBT Americans and the United States’ foreign policy and national security interests. It makes that connection utilizing Professor Derek Bell’s interest convergence paradigm. It argues that the new agenda of the American Religious Right is one that seeks to assert quasi-theocratic and anti-Establishment positions in litigation as well as in its promulgation of anti-LGBT laws. This agenda is cloaked in the garb of “religious freedom,” but the Religious Right’s definition of “religious freedom” is one that runs counter to our long-standing understanding of that principle as one that …

Denying Certiorari In Bell V. Itawamba County School Board: A Missed Opportunity To Clarify Students’ First Amendment Rights In The Digital Age, Elizabeth A. Shaver

Brooklyn Law Review

In the last decade, the federal circuit courts have grappled with the issue whether, and to what extent, school officials constitutionally may discipline students for their off-campus electronic speech. Before 2015, three federal circuit courts had extended school authority to off-campus electronic speech by applying a vague test that allows school officials to reach far beyond the iconic “schoolhouse gate” referenced in the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District. Two other federal circuits had avoided the issue altogether by deciding the cases before them on other grounds. In 2015, the Fifth Circuit Court …

Performative Privacy, Scott Skinner-Thompson

Publications

Broadly speaking, privacy doctrine suggests that the right to privacy is non-existent once one enters the public realm. Although some scholars contend that privacy ought to exist in public, “public privacy” has been defended largely with reference to other, ancillary values privacy may serve. For instance, public privacy may be necessary to make the freedom of association meaningful in practice.

This Article identifies a new dimension of public privacy, supplementing extant justifications for the right, by arguing that many efforts to maintain privacy while in “public” are properly conceptualized as forms of performative, expressive resistance against an ever-pervasive surveillance society. …

Seen And Heard: A Defense Of Judicial Speech, Dmitry Bam

Faculty Publications

Judicial ethics largely prohibits judges from engaging in political activities, including endorsing or opposing candidates for public office. These restrictions on judicial politicking, intended to preserve both the reality and the appearance of judicial integrity, independence, and impartiality, have been in place for decades. Although the Code of Conduct for United States Judges does not apply to the Supreme Court, Supreme Court Justices have long followed the norm that they do not take sides, at least publicly, in partisan political elections. And while elected state judges have some leeway to engage in limited political activities associated with their own candidacy," …

Hate Speech, Public Assurance, And The Civic Standing Of Speakers And Victims, Vincent A. Blasi

Faculty Scholarship

Jeremy Waldron and James Weinstein have opened up a promising line of inquiry regarding the legitimacy and propriety of hate speech regulation. In doing so, they have succeeded in reinvigorating a subject that had grown academically formulaic even while becoming alarmingly more salient politically and culturally. Together they have enriched our understanding with their specificity of argumentation, intellectual courage, fairminded attentiveness to critics and counter-arguments, comparative law perspective, and genuine originality of conception. I find that each has shown me at least one significant problem in the other’s analysis, a symmetry that I consider a tribute to both.

Are Trump's Attacks On The Media Adversely Affecting Public Opinion?, Leonard M. Niehoff

Articles

Both during the election cycle and as president of the United States, Donald Trump has enthusiastically and aggressively attacked the media. On Twitter, in speeches, and at rallies he has repeatedly deployed his favorite “f words” against mainstream broadcast, print, and online news sources: “fake,” “fraudulent,” “failing,” and (phonetically) “phony.” Some attacks have been personal to individual journalists, some have been more institutionally focused, and some have been made in contexts that appeared to create physical risk to reporters who were present. But whatever the variation in lavors, the frequency of the attacks has remained constant. Indeed, Trump has devoted …

Doe V. University Of Michigan: Free Speech On Campus 25 Years Later, Leonard M. Niehoff

Articles

I would like to use as the launching pad for my remarks today the 1989 federal district court decision in Doe v. University of Michigan. Doe is the seminal case on campus speech codes and it just recently passed its twenty-fifth anniversary. I thought this symposium would be a good occasion to look back, see where we were, assess where we are, and ask whether we have made any progress. Spoiler alert: the news is not good.

Triggering Tinker: Student Speech In The Age Of Cyberharassment, Ari Ezra Waldman

Articles & Chapters

This essay challenges the common assumption that public schools have limited authority to regulate cyberbullying that originates and takes place off campus. That argument presumes a level of myopia, clarity, and literalism in the law that simply does not exist. First, even assuming it existed, a geographic requirement is an outdated creature of a preinternet age. Cyberbullying poses unique challenges to young people, educators, and schools not contemplated when the Court decided its student speech cases. If it existed then, it should adapt to today’s realities. Second, I argue that a campus presence requirement for regulating any kind of off-campus …

Privacy And The Right To Record, Margot E. Kaminski

Publications

Many U.S. laws protect privacy by governing recording. Recently, however, courts have recognized a First Amendment “right to record.” This Article addresses how courts should handle privacy laws in light of the developing First Amendment right to record.

The privacy harms addressed by recording laws are situated harms. Recording changes the way people behave in physical spaces by altering the nature of those spaces. Thus, recording laws can be placed within a long line of First Amendment case law that recognizes a valid government interest in managing the qualities of rivalrous physical space, so as not to allow one person’s …

Checking The Government’S Deception Through Public Employee Speech, Helen Norton

Publications

No abstract provided.

Authorship, Disrupted: Ai Authors In Copyright And First Amendment Law, Margot E. Kaminski

Publications

Technology is often characterized as an outside force, with essential qualities, acting on the law. But the law, through both doctrine and theory, constructs the meaning of the technology it encounters. A particular feature of a particular technology disrupts the law only because the law has been structured in a way that makes that feature relevant. The law, in other words, plays a significant role in shaping its own disruption. This Essay is a study of how a particular technology, artificial intelligence, is framed by both copyright law and the First Amendment. How the algorithmic author is framed by these …

Religious Freedom And Recycled Tires: The Meaning And Implications Of Trinity Lutheran, Richard W. Garnett, Jackson C. Blais

Journal Articles

The Supreme Court's decision in Trinity Lutheran clearly affirmed a First Amendment rule against anti-religious discrimination. At the same time, it raised or left open a number of important and interesting questions about education reform, the relevance of anti-Catholic bias to states' so-called Blaine Amendments, and the sharpening tension between religious freedom and the application of antidiscrimination laws.

Free Speech Or Slavery Profiteering?: Solutions For Policing Online Sex--Trafficking Advertisement, Marguerite A. O'Brien

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

Online sex trafficking is big business. The Department of Homeland Security estimates that sex trafficking generates billions of dollars per year. The marketplace for sex has moved from the street corner to classified ad websites such as Backpage.com, and all too often the victims of online sex trafficking are minors. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children reported an 846 percent increase in reports of child sexual exploitation between 2010 and 2015--growth the organization attributes to the availability of sex ads on websites such as Backpage.com. Law enforcement agencies and victims have sought to hold Backpage.com liable for facilitating …

Government Identity Speech Programs: Understanding And Applying The New Walker Test, Leslie Gielow Jacobs

McGeorge School of Law Scholarly Articles

In Walker v. Texas Division, Sons of Confederate Veterans, Inc., the Court extended its previous holding in Pleasant Grove City, Utah v.Summum that a city’s donated park monuments were government speech to the privately proposed designs that Texas accepts and stamps onto its specialty license plates. The placement of the program into the new doctrinal category is significant because the selection criteria for government–private speech combinations that produce government speech are “exempt from First Amendment scrutiny.” By contrast, when the government selects private speakers to participate in a private speech forum, its criteria must be reasonable in light of the …

A Less Corrupt Term," Supreme Court Round-Up For Ot 2016, Kevin C. Walsh, Marc O. Degirolami

Scholarly Articles

In these unusually turbulent times for the presidency and Congress, the Supreme Court’s latest term stands out for its lack of drama. There were no 5–4 end-of-the-term cases that mesmerized the nation. There were no blockbuster decisions.

Even so, the Court was hardly immune to the steady transformation of our governing institutions into reality TV shows. Over the weekend leading into the final day of the term, speculation ignited from who-knows-where about the possible departure of its main character, Justice Anthony Kennedy. To us, the chatter seemed forced—as if the viewing public needed something to fill the vacuum left by …

Religious Accommodation, Religious Tradition, And Political Polarization, Marc O. Degirolami

Scholarly Articles

A religious accommodation is an exemption from compliance with the law for some but not for others. One might therefore suppose that before granting an accommodation, courts would inquire about whether a legal interference with religious belief or practice is truly significant, if only to evaluate whether the risk of political polarization that attends accommodation is worth hazarding. But that is not the case: any assessment of the significance of a religious belief or practice within a claimant's belief system is strictly forbidden.

Two arguments are pressed in support of this view: (1) courts have institutional reasons for acquiescing on …

You Have The Right To Free Speech: Retaliatory Arrests And The Pretext Of Probable Cause, Katherine G. Howard

Georgia Law Review

An important question about an individual's First
Amendment freedoms arises when a citizen or journalist is
arrested while verbally challenging, filming, or writing
about police actions. Did the police officer have legitimate
law enforcement reasons for the arrest, or was the arrest in
retaliationfor engaging in First Amendment activities the
officer did not like? Courts have grappled with the best
way to resolve this question, often importing the Fourth
Amendment's bright-line rule about probable cause into
analyses of FirstAmendment retaliatoryarrest claims and
barringthose claims were the officer had probable cause to
arrest. This Note argues that when retaliatory arrest
claims …

Bankrupt Marketplace: First Amendment Theory And The 2016 Presidential Election, Leonard M. Niehoff

Articles

In this article I advance two arguments. The first is that 2016 was a particularly important year for freedom of speech and the press, although not for conventional reasons. The second is that hte events of 2016 revealed that one of the essential components of our democracy - the central role that free expression plays in the democratic process - is in a state of serious dysfunction, if not crisis.

Tip Of The Iceberg Ii: How The Intended-Uses Principle Produces Medical Knowledge And Protects Liberty, Christopher Robertson, Victor Laurion

Faculty Scholarship

In recent years, the Food and Drug Administration’s pre-market approval process has come under increasing scrutiny as an infringement on liberty and a regulation of speech. In the first part of this symposium contribution, we offer a case study of Seroquel XR, showing how the FDA’s premarket approval process – and the restrictions on “off-label” promotion in particular – caused the drug company to produce and disseminate knowledge about safety and efficacy for new uses. The law successfully resolved the collective action problem of producing knowledge, even while the law protected the liberty of individual doctors and patients to use …

The Internet Will Not Break: Denying Bad Samaritans Section 230 Immunity, Danielle K. Citron, Benjamin Wittes

Faculty Scholarship

What do a revenge pornographer, gossip-site curator, and platform pairing predators with young people in one-on-one chats have in common? Blanket immunity from liability, thanks to lower courts’ interpretation of section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA) beyond what the text, context, and purpose support. The CDA was part of a campaign — rather ironically in retrospect — to restrict access to sexually explicit material online. Lawmakers thought they were devising a safe harbor for online providers engaged in self-regulation. The CDA’s origins in the censorship of “offensive” material are inconsistent with outlandishly broad interpretations that have served to …

The Tip Of The Iceberg: A First Amendment Right To Promote Drugs Off-Label, Christopher Robertson

Faculty Scholarship

Scholars, advocates, and courts have begun to recognize a First Amendment right for the makers of drugs and medical devices to promote their products “off-label,” without proving safety and efficacy of new intended uses. Yet, so far, this debate has occurred in a vacuum of peculiar cases, where convoluted commercial speech doctrine underdetermines the outcome. Juxtaposing these cases against other routine prosecutions of those who peddle unapproved drugs reveals the common legal regime at issue. Review of the seven arguments deployed in the off-label domain finds that, if they were valid, they would undermine the FDA’s entire premarket approval regime. …

Police Misconduct, Video Recording, And Procedural Barriers To Rights Enforcement, Howard M. Wasserman

Faculty Publications

The story of police reform and of "policing the police" has become the story of video and video evidence, and "record everything to know the truth" has become the singular mantra. Video, both police-created and citizen-created, has become the singular tool for ensuring police accountability, reforming law enforcement, and enforcing the rights of victims of police misconduct. This Article explores procedural problems surrounding the use of video recording and video evidence to counter police misconduct, hold individual officers and governments accountable, and reform departmental policies, regulations, and practices. It considers four issues: 1) the mistaken belief that video can "speak …

A Missed Opportunity To Clarify Students' First Amendment Rights In The Digital Age, Elizabeth Shaver

Akron Law Faculty Publications

In the last decade, the federal circuit courts have grappled with the issue whether, and to what extent, school officials constitutionally may discipline students for their off-campus electronic speech. Before 2015, three federal circuit courts had extended school authority to off-campus electronic speech by applying a vague test that allows school officials to reach far beyond the iconic “schoolhouse gate” referenced in the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, 393 U.S. 503 (1969) Two other federal circuits had avoided the issue altogether by deciding the cases before them on other grounds. In 2015, …

Smith, "Neutrality Of Reasons," And The Search For Animating Principles, Gerard V. Bradley

Journal Articles

The Distinctiveness of Religion in American Law: Rethinking Religion Clause Jurisprudence by Kathleen Brady

Justice Antonin Scalia’s death stirred a gratifying amount of praise for his life’s work. Among the rose petals tossed his way were, however, some thorns, including renewed criticism of his opinion in Employment Division v. Smith. The Smith Court spent most of its time arguing against a particular interpretation of the Free Exercise Clause, one that authorized judges to grant exemptions to believers burdened by general laws. But without quite identifying it as such, and without argument based in historical source material, the Court came …

The View From My Window: The Roberts Court's First Amendment Symposium, Gregory P. Magarian

Scholarship@WashULaw

The experience of writing a book and then reading what some very smart and knowledgeable people have to say about the subject matter is humbling and a little dizzying. In Managed Speech: The Roberts Court's First Amendment, I try to make some sense of the present Supreme Court's decisions over the past decade about the First Amendment's protections for free expression.' The book argues that those decisions, taken as a whole, excessively constrain free speech within a particular managerial framework. Rather than helping speech to flourish in all its noisy, messy glory, the Roberts Court favors First Amendment claims from …

Loving The Sinner: Evangelical Colleges And Their Lgb Students, Elizabeth J. Hubertz

Scholarship@WashULaw

In his Obergefell dissent, Chief Justice Robert wrote: “Hard questions arise when people of faith exercise religion in ways that may be seen to conflict with the new right to same-sex marriage.” This article looks at one of those hard questions - the relationship between evangelical colleges and their LGB students.

As religious institutions, evangelical colleges have authority to freely exercise their faith. They exercise this freedom by maintaining sexual conduct codes which prohibit homosexual practice or behavior by their students. Despite the existence of these codes, evangelical colleges have, and most likely always will have, sexual minority students. While …

Peyote And Ghouls In The Night: Justice Scalia's Religion Clause Minimalism, John D. Inazu

Scholarship@WashULaw

The late Justice Antonin Scalia held a minimalist view of the religion clauses: the Free Exercise Clause does not protect against neutral laws of general applicability, and the Establishment Clause prohibits neither longstanding traditional practices nor legislative acts with a plausible secular purpose. In both free exercise and establishment cases, Scalia resisted judicial second-guessing of legislative judgments unless he saw an explicit singling out of religious practice. Yet Scalia had an uneven influence on religion clause jurisprudence. When it came to the Free Exercise Clause, he played a pivotal role in shaping a doctrinal framework that has arguably created more …

Unlawful Assembly As Social Control, John D. Inazu

Scholarship@WashULaw

Recent public protests from Occupy to Ferguson have highlighted anew the offense of unlawful assembly. This Article advances the simple but important thesis that contemporary approaches to unlawful assembly cede too much discretion to law enforcement. Too many unlawful assembly provisions neglect important elements of earlier statutory formulations. They also ignore constitutional principles meant to constrain the scope and extent of discretionary enforcement of social control by public authorities. In doing so, they fall short of the aspirations of the First Amendment — stifling dissent, muting expression, and ultimately weakening the democratic experiment. We can do better. We can start …