First Amendment Commons^™

Adolescent Identity Versus The First Amendment: Sexuality And Speech Rights In The Public Schools, Steven J. Macias

San Diego Law Review

This Article examines the legal tensions that currently exist between public schools' attempts to protect gay students from bullying and harassment and antigay students' First Amendment rights to engage in allegedly harassing speech. First, it looks at the popular conception of the relationship between childhood or adolescence and sexuality by considering the political and legal fallout of the same-sex marriage debate. Then this Article turns to a conception of public schooling that would allow for the constitutionally permissible regulation of antigay-identity speech. Next, through the use of critical theory, this Article explains why First Amendment defenses to gay harassment have …

Judicial Line-Drawing And The Broader Culture: The Case Of Politics And Entertainment, R. George Wright

San Diego Law Review

This article puts in a broader legal and cultural context and critically evaluates Justice Scalia's reluctance to distinguish politics from entertainment or, more precisely, political speech from entertainment speech. Some may think of Justice Scalia's reluctance as the embodiment of judicial modesty or realistic practical wisdom. Others may think of it as an unnecessary expression of relativism or subjectivism that is ominous in its implications. Either way, whether we can appropriately distinguish between entertainment speech and political speech, and then apply appropriately different free speech standards in each case, says much about our status and priorities as a culture. Placing …

Privacy Rights: The Virtue Of Protecting A False Reputation, John A. Humbach

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

What is the virtue of protecting a false reputation? The thesis of this paper is that there is none. There is none, at least, that justifies the suppression of free speech. Yet, there is a growing trend to see the protection of reputation from truth as a key function of the so-called “right of privacy.”

Unfortunately, people often do things that they are not proud of or do not want others to know about. Often, however, these are precisely the things that others want or need to know. For our own protection, each of us is better off being aware …

Will Free Speech Get A License To Drive In Florida?: A Proposal For Distinguishing Free Speech From Government Speech In Florida Specialty Plate Cases, Christopher Robert Dillingham Ii

Florida A & M University Law Review

Specialty license plates for automobiles, which publish individual and special interest Free Speech, present a quagmire for the courts when analyzed through the lens of the First Amendment's Free Speech Clause. While citizens and groups can obtain personalized license plates that publish both symbolic and written speech, state governments often exercise strict editorial control over their license plates. This regulatory scenario raises the dual questions of who is speaking - the government or the private party - and how much constitutional power the government has to engage in viewpoint restriction in regulating that speech in this traditional government forum. The …

Falsely Shouting Fire In A Global Theater: Emerging Complexities Of Transborder Expression, Timothy Zick

Vanderbilt Law Review

This Article examines the First Amendment complexities associated with the dissemination of potentially harmful information in the global theater. These complexities include global dissemination of offensive expression, incitement to unlawful activities abroad, enemy-aiding expression that crosses territorial borders, and global free press concerns. The author argues that traditional First Amendment doctrines and principles ought generally to apply in the global theater. Reliance on marketplace and self-governance principles, application of speech-protective incitement standards, and continued support for an expansive and robust conception of press freedoms will preserve transborder First Amendment liberties in the digital era and allow the global theater to …

The Association Of Adult Businesses With Secondary Effects: Legal Doctrine, Social Theory, And Empirical Evidence, Alan C. Weinstein, Richard D. Mccleary

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

In the decade since the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Alameda Books v. City of Los Angeles, 535 U.S. 425 (2002), the adult entertainment industry has attacked the legal rationale local governments rely upon as the justification for their regulation of adult businesses: that such businesses are associated with so-called negative secondary effects. These attacks have taken a variety of forms, including: trying to subject the studies of secondary effects relied upon by local governments to the Daubert standard for admission of scientific evidence in federal litigation; producing studies that purport to show no association between adult businesses and negative …

United States V. Stevens: Win, Loss, Or Draw For Animals?, David N. Cassuto

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

Robert J. Stevens, proprietor of “Dogs of Velvet and Steel,” was indicted for marketing dog-fighting videos in violation of 18 U.S.C. §48, a law criminalizing visual or auditory depictions of animals being “intentionally mutilated, tortured, wounded, or killed” if such conduct violated federal or state law where “the creation, sale, or possession [of such materials]” takes place.” The law aimed principally at makers and distributors of “crush videos” wherein women wearing high heels and depicted from the waist down, grind small animals to death. However, the language of 18 U.S.C. §48 extended to dog-fighting as well. Stevens challenged the law …

Government May Not Speak Out-Of-Turn, Steven H. Goldberg

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

Johanns v. Livestock Marketing Association5 was about whether government could compel individual beef producers to pay for general beef advertising credited to "America's Beef Producers;" even if they disagreed with the message and wanted to spend their advertising money to distinguish their certified Angus or Hereford beef. That "compelled subsidy" case became the unlikely authority for a doctrine invented in Pleasant Grove City, Utah v. Summum6 that government could discriminate, based on viewpoint, on a subject for which it had no power to act. Each case has been criticized in its own right, but the attempt to make Johanns precedent …

The Crazy Horse Malt Liquor Case: From Tradition To Modernity And Halfway Back (Part Iii Of South Dakota Law Review Trilogy), Frank Pommersheim

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Neoformalism And The Reemergence Of The Right-Privilege Distinction In Public Employment Law, Paul M. Secunda

San Diego Law Review

The First Amendment speech rights of public employees, which have traditionally enjoyed protection under the doctrine of unconstitutional conditions, have suddenly diminished in recent years. At one time developed to shut the door on the infamous privilege/rights distinction, the unconstitutional conditions doctrine has now been increasingly used to rob these employees of their constitutional rights.

Three interrelated developments explain this state of affairs. First, a jurisprudential school of thought--the "subsidy school"--has significantly undermined the vitality of the unconstitutional conditions doctrine through its largely successful sparring with an alternative school of thought, the "penalty school." Second, although initially developed in the …

Do Sexting Prosecutions Violate Teenagers' Constitutional Rights?, Joanne Sweeny

San Diego Law Review

The media has recently been highlighting a rash of prosecutions of teenagers who engage in "sexting"--sending nude or sexually explicit images of themselves or their peers--under child pornography laws. These prosecutions have led to mass criticism for threatening teens with long prison terms and registration as sex offenders for activities that are perceived to be relatively innocent. Many, if not most, of these sexting teens are legally permitted to engage in sexual activities through their states' statutory rape laws, which leads to an absurd situation in which teens are permitted to engage in sex but not photograph it. This mismatch …

William H. Sorrell, Attorney General Of Vermont, Et Al. V. Ims Health Inc., Et Al. - Amicus Brief In Support Of Petitioners, Kevin Outterson, David Orentlicher, Christopher T. Robertson, Frank A. Pasquale

Faculty Scholarship

On April 26, 2011, the US Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in the Vermont data mining case, Sorrell v. IMS Health Inc. Respondents claim this is the most important commercial speech case in a decade. Petitioner (the State of Vermont) argues this is the most important medical privacy case since Whalen v. Roe.

The is an amicus brief supporting Vermont, written by law professors and submitted on behalf of the New England Journal of Medicine

Hope-Fulfilling Or Effectively Chilling? Reconciling The Hate Crimes Prevention Act With The First Amendment, Carter T. Coker

Vanderbilt Law Review

Living on a meager disability pension and without means of transportation, forty-nine-year-old African American James Byrd, Jr. of Jasper, Texas thought he had caught a break when three white men offered him a ride home on June 6, 1998. The following morning, police found Byrd's torso in the middle of the road, his head and arm in a ditch a mile away, and a three-mile trail of blood staining the road. That racial animus was the motivation for Byrd's torture, dragging, and death was hardly in dispute. Two of the three perpetrators were members of white supremacist organizations and bore …

Recognizing The Public Schools' Authority To Discipline Students' Off-Campus Cyberbullying Of Classmates, Douglas E. Abrams

Faculty Publications

The American Medical Association, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have identified bullying in the public elementary and secondary schools as a "public health problem". This article explains the schools' comprehensive authority, consistent with the First Amendment, to impose discipline on cyberbullies, by suspension or expulsion if necessary. Ever since Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District (1969), the Supreme Court's First Amendment decisions have granted the schools authority to discipline student speech that causes, or reasonably threatens, (1) "substantial disruption of or material interference with school …

Can Speech By Fda-Regulated Firms Ever Be Noncommercial?, Nathan Cortez

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

This Article considers whether speech by pharmaceutical, medical device, and other FDA-regulated companies can ever be noncommercial and thus subject to heightened protection under the First Amendment. Since the U.S. Supreme Court first recognized a right to commercial speech in 1976, there have been 24 published federal judicial opinions in which an FDA-regulated firm has argued that its speech was protected. Courts have categorized the speech as commercial in all but two cases, neither of which involved FDA rules or enforcement.

I examine the tests and factors courts claim they use when making this threshold distinction, then identify the various …

Anti-Cyber Bullying Statutes: Threat To Student Free Speech, John O. Hayward

Cleveland State Law Review

On October 17, 2006, Megan Meier, a thirteen-year-old girl in Dardenne Prairie, Missouri, who had been diagnosed with attention deficit disorder and depression, committed suicide because of postings on MySpace, an Internet social networking site, saying she was a bad person whom everyone hated and the world would be better off without. As a result, the state revised its harassment and stalking statutes to prohibit using electronic means to knowingly "frighten, intimidate, or cause emotional distress to another person."' At the time of this writing, twenty-one states have passed similar legislation with others sure to follow. Many of these statutes …

The Myth Of Church-State Separation, David E. Steinberg

Cleveland State Law Review

This article asserts that the church-state separation interpretation of Establishment Clause history is simply wrong. The framers were focused on the first five words of the amendment, which read: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof . . . .” The original Establishment Clause was a guarantee that the federal government would not interfere in state regulation of religion-whatever form that state regulation took. Rather than enacting the Establishment Clause to mandate a separation of church and state, the framers adopted the clause to protect divergent state practices-including state establishment of …

Brand Renegades, Jeremy N. Sheff

Faculty Publications

Recent appearances of trademarks in popular culture-in rap lyrics, on reality TV shows, even in youth riots have raised the question whether the owners of those trademarks might pursue legal remedies to protect their brands from unwanted social associations. This Article argues that they cannot, and that we should understand this limitation on trademark rights as grounded in a principle that consumption of certain brands is an expressive act that First Amendment principles place outside trademark owners' control.

Pornography As Pollution, John Copeland Nagle

Journal Articles

Pornography is often compared to pollution. But little effort has been made to consider what it means to describe pornography as a pollution problem, even as many legal scholars have concluded that the law has failed to control internet pornography. Opponents of pornography maintain passionate convictions about how sexually-explicit materials harm both those who are exposed to them and the broader cultural environment. Viewers of pornography may generally hold less fervent beliefs, but champions of free speech and of a free internet object to anti-pornography regulations with strong convictions of their own. The challenge is how to address the widespread …

The Equal Protection Implications Of Government's Hateful Speech, Helen Norton

Publications

Under what circumstances should we understand government's racist or otherwise hateful speech to violate the Equal Protection Clause? Government speech that communicates hostility or animus on the basis of race, gender, national origin, sexual orientation, or other class status can facilitate private parties' discriminatory behavior, deter its targets from certain important opportunities or activities, and communicate a message of exclusion and second-class status. Contemporary equal protection doctrine, however, does not yet fully address the harms that such government expression potentially poses. The recent emergence of the Court's government speech doctrine--which to date has emphasized the value of government expression without …

Panel Discussion At "Signs Of The Times: The First Amendment And Religious Symbolism", Carl H. Esbeck

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Right Labels, Wrong Categories: Some Comments On Steven D. Smith's, 'Why Is Government Speech Problematic?', Alan K. Chen

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

This essay is a response to a paper presented by the noted First Amendment scholar, Steven D. Smith, at the 17th Ira C. Rothgerber, Jr. Constitutional Law Conference, “Government Speech in Transition.” In his thoughtful paper, Professor Smith addresses the theoretical underpinnings of free speech analysis as applied to the confounding problem of government speech. He argues that much of the confusion surrounding government speech can be addressed by reaching a clearer understanding of three problems – the unnecessary problem (a misguided commitment to government neutrality), an unnoticed problem (the issue of institutional capture), and the “big” problem (the lack …

Astrachan And Easton: Fight Wikileaks Case In Court, Not In Cyberspace, James B. Astrachan, Eric Easton

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Reflections On Breach Of Confidence From The U.S. Experience, Brian C. Murchison

Scholarly Articles

Not available.

Citizens Disunited, Steven L. Winter

Law Faculty Research Publications

No abstract provided.

Regulating Offensiveness: Snyder V. Phelps, Emotion, And The First Amendment, Christina E. Wells

Faculty Publications

In its upcoming term, the Court will decide in Snyder v. Phelps whether Albert Snyder can sue the Reverend Fred Phelps and other members of the Westboro Baptist Church for invasion of privacy and intentional infliction of emotional distress for protesting near his son’s funeral. Those arguing in favor of tort liability claim that the Phelps’ speech during a time of mourning and vulnerability is especially outrageous and injurious and that the First Amendment allows such regulation. Their arguments, however, effectively rely on the offensiveness of the Phelps’ message rather than on any external indicia of harm, such as noisy …

Poison Pens, Intimidating Icons, And Worrisome Websites: Off-Campus Student Speech That Challenges Both Campus Safety And First Amendment Jurisprudence, Kathy Luttrell Garcia

St. Thomas Law Review

As the line between off-campus and on-campus student speech is increasingly blurred by the internet, educators and courts alike are struggling to determine the limits of school authority to restrict student speech that originates off-campus but is directed toward an on-campus audience. Although students retain their First-Amendment-protected rights of free speech and expression on school campuses during school hours, these rights are subject to exceptions. These exceptions are constitutionally permissible, even where the speech could not be restricted off campus, because "student First Amendment rights are 'applied in light of the special characteristics of the school environment." Because of these …

The Myth Of The Level Playing Field: Knowledge, Affect, And Repetition In Public Debate, Jeremy N. Sheff

Faculty Publications

The industrialization of the channels and scale of communication has led some well-meaning reformers to try to regulate the ability of powerful private actors to leverage economic inequality into political inequality, particularly in the area of campaign finance. Such reform efforts are ostensibly intended to further the deliberative democratic ideal of rational, informed public decision making by preventing well-funded private interests from improperly influencing democratic debate and, by extension, political outcomes. This Article examines empirical findings in political science, psychology, and marketing and argues that, in the context of contemporary American society, the normative principles of deliberative democracy and formal …

Is There A Paradox In Amending A Sacred Text?, Beau Breslin

Maryland Law Review

No abstract provided.

Thomas Jefferson, We Have A Problem: The Unconstitutionality Nature Of The U.S.'S Aerospace Export Control Regime As Supposed By Bernstein V. U.S. Department Of Justice , Mike N. Gold

Cleveland State Law Review

All men are created equal, except aerospace workers. This was not how the Declaration of Independence was written, but it is how the U.S. government is currently enforcing its aerospace-related export control restrictions. Specifically, under the auspices of the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (“ITAR”)1 those in the aerospace workforce have unwittingly surrendered their First Amendment rights to free speech. This article will describe how the Ninth Circuit case of Bernstein v. U.S. Department of Justice2 clearly demonstrates the unconstitutional nature of the ITAR and will recommend reforms that would bring America's export control regime back into line with the …