First Amendment Commons^™

Taxing The Architecture: A Structural Remedy For Disinformation In The Algorithmic Marketplace, Padmakshi Sharma

LL.M. Essays & Theses

This paper argues that the constitutional assumption that truth will prevail over falsehood in the marketplace of ideas has always depended on three structural preconditions. These conditions were: distributive parity for counter-speech, institutional segmentation of the information environment, and epistemic credibility signals that allowed non-expert audiences to distinguish authoritative from non-authoritative sources. Together, these conditions ensured that truth was granted a structural advantage sufficient to offset the harms of falsehood. Social media platforms have destroyed all of these conditions. The destruction is a consequence of an economic model organized around behavioral advertising and engagement maximization, which systematically amplifies disinformation over …

Religious Freedom, Jesuit Mission, And Dei, William M. Treanor, Amelia J. Uelmen

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The ability of Jesuit educational institutions to pursue a central part of their mission – that of fostering diverse, equitable and inclusive educational environments – is under attack. This essay outlines several dimensions of their religiously-grounded mission and the reasons to strongly protect from government interference the rights of Jesuit universities to implement programs and practices that align with DEI values. First, for Jesuit universities, these programs and practices are rooted in a much deeper culture of the more than 2,000-year old Catholic intellectual tradition and the now 500-year old tradition of Jesuit spirituality. Second, drawing on the classic work …

Sacred Or Sham? Strengthening Judicial Review Of Religious Sincerity Under The Free Exercise Clause Article Title, Montana Martinez

Faculty Scholarship

While the Court has expanded the scope of Free Exercise protections, it has conspicuously failed to articulate how courts should separate sincere religious claims from fraudulent ones. The result is a doctrinal void: any claimant can recast political or philosophical objections as "religious" and demand constitutional protection. The risk is that the Free Exercise Clause, if stripped of any sincerity filter, will collapse into a generalized right to exemption from law. This Article argues that courts can assess religious sincerity without evaluating the truth or validity of the religious belief, and it proposes a framework grounded in the constitutional text, …

Regulating Crisis Pregnancy Centers After Nifla And Dobbs: Controversies Over When Government Is Imposing An Orthodoxy About Abortion, Linda C. Mcclain

Faculty Scholarship

How does this broader sense of Barnette’s proscription of government from imposing “what shall be orthodox” implicate governmental restrictions on reproductive autonomy? Battles over reproductive freedom centrally implicate objections that government is unconstitutionally imposing a gender orthodoxy. Arguments for a right of personal autonomy embodying an antitotalitarian principle of liberty are arguments for a right to resist governmental imposition of an orthodoxy— for example, an idea about the natural or traditional role of women as mothers together with a view about how best to respect the sanctity of life. Rights to reproductive autonomy, grounded in personal autonomy and equality, …

Abandoning Press Freedom, Ronnell Andersen Jones, Sonja R. West

Scholarly Works

Among elected officials and the broader public, attitudes toward the press are deeply polarized along ideological lines. Polling shows that most liberals favor the press, while conservatives view it more negatively— a partisan divide that has widened significantly over the past decade. Conventional wisdom suggests that the same ideological split is also at work at the Supreme Court, with liberal Justices championing the work of the press while their conservative colleagues express more skepticism. This perception is reinforced by historical examples of liberal Justices advancing press rights alongside broader democracy-engagement and social-justice issues. Recent calls from some conservative Justices to …

Press Freedom's History And Tradition, Ronnell Andersen Jones, Sonja R. West

Scholarly Works

Backward-looking, history-and-tradition analysis is gaining greater prominence at the U.S. Supreme Court. While the Court has not yet explicitly applied its history-and-tradition framework to press freedom questions, the methodology’s dominance across other areas, coupled with some urgent concerns about the scope of newsgatherer protections and some Justices’ interest in reconsidering long-established precedent, suggest that this application could be imminent. In anticipation of that moment, we set out to empirically map the Court’s engagement with the history and tradition of press freedom in its rhetoric over time. Our goals were to explore, both quantitatively and qualitatively, how the Court’s Justices have …

Mahmoud V. Taylor: Cause Or Effect Of Disruptions In Public Schools?, Richard B. Katskee, Ira C. Lupu

Faculty Scholarship

Mahmoud v. Taylor represents an extraordinary departure from long-standing constitutional norms about the rights of parents of children in public schools. In Mahmoud, the Supreme Court upheld a Free Exercise Clause claim by parents in Montgomery County, Maryland, who sought to have their children (grades K–5) excused from readings that contain LGBTQ characters and themes. The majority opinion by Justice Alito rests on a highly controversial reading of Wisconsin v. Yoder.

Part I of the paper provides the doctrinal and historical backdrop to Mahmoud, which reflects the acute tension between a once-narrow understanding of Yoder and the post-Obergefell backlash against …

Two Questions For School-Choice Funding After Carson, Nicole Stelle Garnett, John A. Meiser

Journal Articles

In a series of recent cases, the Supreme Court of the United States has made clear that the First Amendment's Free Exercise Clause prohibits religious discrimination in public benefit programs. That is, when the government creates a public benefit program, the Free Exercise Clause prohibits it from excluding private entities from participating because of their religious character or status or because they engage in religious conduct. This essay addresses two questions raised left unresolved by these cases and flags a third. The first question is, what is private? The religious nondiscrimination principle applies only when the government aids private conduct. …