First Amendment Commons^™

The Pamela Anderson Exception: How The Public Figure Doctrine Makes Involuntary Pornography A Subject Of Public Concern In Congress’S Revenge Porn Statute, Jared Kossover

Vanderbilt Law Review

Congress’s chosen remedy for the proliferation of online revenge porn has a design flaw. The Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act, codified in 15 U.S.C. § 6851, provides a civil right, enforceable in federal court, to victims of nonconsensual pornography. However, exceptions for matters within the “public concern,” written into the statute with the First Amendment in mind, weaken the force of the Act and threaten to make its proscriptions a nullity. This Note calls on Congress to narrow the public concern exception in the Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act to include only matters of political significance. Such an amendment will …

Interesting Intersections Of Immigration And First Amendment Law, David L. Hudson Jr., Maximiliano Gluzman

Law Faculty Scholarship

This article examines the complex and evolving intersections between immigration law and the First Amendment, identifying four doctrinal areas in which free speech claims arise prominently. First, it analyzes historical and contemporary grounds of inadmissibility and deportability based on speech, including ideological exclusions targeting anarchists and communists, and considers the continuing influence of the plenary power doctrine. Second, it explores retaliatory deportation claims, in which noncitizens allege that removal proceedings were initiated or accelerated in response to protected political advocacy, highlighting the chilling effects such actions may impose on core political speech. Third, the article evaluates constitutional challenges to federal …

Unfinished Liberties, Inevitable Balancing, Sherif Girgis

Journal Articles

From the Article

In constitutional liberties cases, the Supreme Court has tried to reduce balancing, understood loosely to mean determining a right’s contours based on sweeping political-moral considerations, not just text and history. It fears that today’s balancing would displace a balance struck by the Founders. Balancing is indeed problematic—but this campaign to end it is bound to fail. Though avoidable for many constitutional rights, balancing is inevitable for general liberties like religion, the Second Amendment, and speech. This inevitability arises not from gaps in text or history but from these liberties’ special role.

General liberties are irreducibly open-ended—not reducible …

The Problem Of Biased Precedents, Ronen Avraham, Issachar Rosen-Zvi

Cardozo Law Review

This Article addresses the problem ofbiased precedents, wherein sophisticated repeat players, often corporate and state entities armed with superior resources and a vested interest in shaping the law, manipulate legal proceedings to systematically establish self-advantageous precedents. Specifically, by strategically choosing to litigate cases they anticipate will lead to favorable precedents and settling those expected to produce unfavorable outcomes, these players systematically bias the law over time to their advantage, at the expense of one-shot parties and society at large. The problem of biased precedents challenges the commonly held view about the efficiency and fairness of the legal system and raises …

Guaranteeing The Press, Jacob M. Schriner-Briggs

St. John's Law Review

A vibrant press is vital to meaningful self-government. Indeed, the indispensability of investigative journalism to democracy raises the stakes of the news industry’s ongoing collapse. Many of the country’s most prominent outlets are shedding jobs as local operations shutter entirely. The downstream effects of this market contraction frustrate the informed exercise of popular sovereignty.

Because journalism is a public good in the economic sense, the state must intervene to provision it. To this end, scholars have generally endorsed one of two legal bases for government action. The first argues that the First Amendment can constitutionalize press-favoring market interventions. The second …

Occupy, Nicholas Marti

Nebraska Journal on Advancing Justice

No abstract provided.

Rise Re-Entry Program, Rise Artists

Nebraska Journal on Advancing Justice

No abstract provided.

Airport Milk Justice, Elsbeth Magilton

Nebraska Journal on Advancing Justice

This creative and personal Essay explores the complex and often overlooked experience of a new working mother. Through a series of personal stories featuring airports and security personnel, this author navigates the struggles and lack of support from society for breastfeeding on-the-go. Ultimately, the author was able to use these personal experiences and turn them into a positive advocacy mission for herself and for other working mothers across the United States by finding solutions and reaching out to airport regulators. This piece highlights candidly the intersection between motherhood and the professional world by illustrating the difficulties and evolving expectations for …

A Love Letter To The Leaders: Why Recognizing And Discussing Secondary Trauma In Legal Work Will Benefit Your Staff, Your Clients, And Most Importantly, The Work, Isabel Corngold, Elizabeth Cole

Nebraska Journal on Advancing Justice

When you work in a client-facing, client-centered section of the law like criminal law, and specifically wrongful convictions, you encounter trauma. Many organizations, including innocence organizations, do not do a sufficient job to recognize and address the impact of that trauma on their staff. This piece seeks to explain the potential impact of this trauma by, one, defining the terms burnout; secondary and vicarious trauma; empathetic distress; countertransference; and compassion fatigue, and, two, listing out signs and symptoms that can be caused by experiencing any of these emotions. Drawing from the authors’ experiences in innocence organizations, this piece addresses leaders …

Extraterritorial Civil Liability After Mallory: A Potential New Weapon For Anti-Abortion States In The Interstate Abortion War, Velma Lockman

Nebraska Journal on Advancing Justice

Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization marked the culmination of a decades-long movement to overturn the constitutional right to abortion established in Roe v. Wade. The decision commenced an interstate abortion war, in which anti-abortion states are now seeking to enforce their anti-abortion statutes in pro-abortion states. One such statute is Senate Bill 8 (“S.B.8”), a Texas anti-abortion statute that utilizes civil liability to prosecute anyone for “aiding or abetting” abortion.

The year after Dobbs, the Supreme Court issued their opinion in Mallory v. Norfolk Southern Railway Company, which upheld a Pennsylvania consent-by-registration statute and allows Pennsylvania courts to exercise …

Ecarrots: Prison Control And Profits From Correctional Tablets, Justin Iverson

Nebraska Journal on Advancing Justice

In recent years, tablets have gained tremendous popularity behind bars for their ability to expand access to educational and rehabilitative services for people in prison. However, there are downsides to tablet implementation, including high costs at the expense of a captive population and shifting power dynamics resulting in possible volatility. This Article examines the use of correctional tablets in jails and prisons as mechanisms for administrative control and profit-making in an era of beleaguered correctional budgets. It also considers legal and policy implications related to the disproportionately negative impact of the introduction of tablets on people in poverty, increased dependency …

Forewords To The Inaugural Issue, Njaj Editorial Board, Richard Moberly, Stefanie S. Pearlman, Kala Mueller, Danielle Jefferis, Brooklyn Terrill

Nebraska Journal on Advancing Justice

No abstract provided.

2024-25 Masthead, Njaj Editorial Board

Nebraska Journal on Advancing Justice

No abstract provided.

Table Of Contents, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

Table of Contents

Re-Imagining Tomorrow: A Technology, Innovation Law, And Ethics Symposium On Addictive Technology And Children, Margaret Chon

Seattle University Law Review

In this Foreword, Professor Margaret Chon introduces Seattle University's Technology, Innovation Law, and Ethics (TILE) program, the 2024 TILE Symposium, and Dr. Gaia Bernstein’s Unwired: Gaining Control Over Addictive Technologies.

Keynote Address: The Movement To Protect Kids From Addictive Technologies, Gaia Bernstein

Seattle University Law Review

In this keynote address, I describe my personal journey starting with a school outreach program I created in 2017 to address technology overuse among kids. While I initially advocated for self-help methods, I grew to recognize that the tech industry bore responsibility. This realization led me to write Unwired: Gaining Control over Addictive Technologies, which focused on collective action to pressure the tech industry to redesign its addictive products.

I then describe the movement to control addictive technologies and protect kids, which has gained momentum since the end of the pandemic. This movement combines grassroots parent activism with legal-political action. …

Moral Panic Or Public Health Crisis? Lessons From Drugs And Gambling For “Addictive” Design, Matthew B. Lawrence, Haomin (Kevin) Yan

Seattle University Law Review

Alcohol, automobiles, guns, lottery, loot boxes, meat, music, opioid painkillers, processed foods, prop bets, slot machines, television, tobacco, violent video games. Over the last century each of these has been subject to concerns—some might even say “moral panics”—from parents and policymakers about avoidable harms to kids and adults. In some cases we look back with the benefit of hindsight and dismiss those concerns as naïve or moralistic. In others we look back at them as justified or as having come too late to check an expanding industry before it did unfathomable harm while growing so powerful that it became all …

Responding To Digital Addiction, Ned Snow

Seattle University Law Review

In Unwired: Gaining Control over Addictive Technologies, Professor Gaia Bernstein calls our attention to the growing problem of digital addiction. Digital addiction may sound like something out of a science-fiction novel or something that does not raise the same sort of real-life practical concerns as are present in a physical health crisis or an economic decline. But as Bernstein presents the evidence, we learn that the consequences of digital addiction can be just as harmful as a serious disease or a financial depression. Cognitive development disorders, anxiety, emotional depression, social isolation, and other mental health ills can be debilitating—as much …

The Ai Doppelgänger Dilemma: Cloned Voices In The Music Industry, Elizabeth Shields

Seattle University Law Review

With the rise of generative artificial intelligence (AI), there has been an influx of “voice clones”—deep-learning algorithms that create synthetic speech to realistically mimic human voices. Celebrities and, in particular, music artists, have been subjected to the proliferation of AI voice clones on social media platforms like TikTok and streaming platforms such as Spotify. Despite music utilizing AI voice clones having amassed much popularity, this technology can be harmful and highly invasive to musicians whose livelihoods often depend on their distinct voices. While legal scholars have attempted to articulate various rights that could protect a person’s voice, individuals are largely …

Let The Sunshine In: Crafting Constitutional Transparency Regulations For Content Moderation, Caitlin Ring Carlson

Seattle University Law Review

In response to public concern about the impact of social media, legislators in some U.S. states have developed laws to regulate the process of content moderation. Many include mandatory transparency and disclosure requirements, some of which courts have already deemed an unconstitutional infringement on social media platforms’ right to free expression. This article explores the parameters for crafting constitutional social media transparency regulations using existing U.S. media policy and insights from recent legal challenges. The resulting analysis identifies content neutral transparency requirements that mandate the disclosure of purely factual, non-controversial information as those most likely to withstand judicial scrutiny. Specifically, …