First Amendment Commons^™

Second Things First: What Free Speech Can And Can’T Say About Guns, Joseph Blocher

Faculty Scholarship

Professor Blocher responds to Gregory Magarian’s article on the implications of the First Amendment for the Second.

Speaking Truth To Firepower: How The First Amendment Destabilizes The Second, Gregory P. Magarian

Scholarship@WashULaw

When the Supreme Court in District of Columbia v. Heller declared that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms, it set atop the federal judicial agenda the critical task of elaborating the new right’s scope, limits, and content. Following Heller, commentators routinely draw upon the First Amendment’s protections for expressive freedom to support their proposals for Second Amendment doctrine. In this article, Professor Magarian advocates a very different role for the First Amendment in explicating the Second, and he contends that our best understanding of First Amendment theory and doctrine severely diminishes the Second Amendment’s …

Factions For The Rest Of Us, John D. Inazu

Scholarship@WashULaw

This essay responds to essays by Professors Ashutosh Bhagwat, Susan Appleton, and Robert Vischer on my book Liberty’s Refuge: The Forgotten Freedom of Assembly. The essays were presented at a March 2012 discussion hosted by Washington University School of Law that included additional presentations from Gregory Magarian, Bernadette Meyler, Ian MacMullen, and Neil Richards.

I had three objectives in writing Liberty’s Refuge, one diagnostic, one historical, and one normative. The diagnosis highlights difficulties with the current doctrine of intimate and expressive association. The history excavates the prominent role that the right of assembly occupies in our constitutional and popular past. …

Justice Ginsburg And Religious Liberty, John D. Inazu

Scholarship@WashULaw

Justice Ginsburg has left an important mark on many areas of the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence, but she has written relatively little in the area of religion. This relatively small footprint increased significantly in the opinion that she wrote in the Court's 2010 decision in Christian Legal Society v. Martinez. In particular, Martinez's dismissal of the religious association claim at the center of the case dealt a severe blow to religious liberty advocates who have struggled to find alternate means of protecting religious expression in the twenty years since the Court’s decision in Employment Division v. Smith (which relegated to rational …

Liberty's Refuge: The Forgotten Freedom Of Assembly, John D. Inazu

Scholarship@WashULaw

This original and provocative book looks at an important constitutional freedom that today is largely forgotten: the right of assembly. While this right lay at the heart of some of the most important social movements in American history—abolitionism, women's suffrage, the labor and civil rights movements—courts now prefer to speak about the freedoms of association and speech. But the right of “expressive association” undermines protections for groups whose purposes are demonstrable not by speech or expression but through ways of being. John D. Inazu demonstrates that the forgetting of assembly and the embrace of association lose sight of important dimensions …

Entering Liberty's Refuge (Some Assembly Required) Panel Discussion On Engaging Liberty's Refuge: Introduction, Gregory P. Magarian

Scholarship@WashULaw

This brief discussion of a book I greatly admire, by an author I am fortunate to know as a colleague and a friend, cannot hope to capture all of the book’s important and interesting contributions. I will simply describe three of the book’s primary facets. Liberty’s Refuge is, first, a work of intellectual history: Inazu seeks to recover from history’s tall grass a legally respected Anglo-American tradition of assembly. The book is also a work of constitutional interpretation and legal analysis: Inazu aims to revitalize the right of assembly for our time, critiquing the legal decisions that he sees as …

Electronic Privacy And Employee Speech, Pauline Kim

Scholarship@WashULaw

The boundary between work and private life is blurring as a result of changes in the organization of work and advances in technology. Current privacy law is ill-equipped to address these changes and as a result, employees’ privacy in their electronic communications is only weakly protected from employer scrutiny. At the same time, the law increasingly protects certain socially valued forms of employee speech. In particular, collective speech, speech that enforces workplace regulations and speech that deters or reports employer wrong-doing are explicitly protected by law from employer reprisals. These two developments — weak protection of employee privacy and increased …

Religion And Race: The Ministerial Exception Reexamined, Ian Bartrum

NULR Online

No abstract provided.

Religious Freedom, Church–State Separation, And The Ministerial Exception, Thomas C. Berg, Kimberlee Wood Colby, Carl H. Esbeck, Richard W. Garnett

NULR Online

No abstract provided.

Brief Of The Intellectual Property Amicus Brief Clinic Of The University Of New Hampshire School Of Law As Amicus Curiae In Support Of Neither Party, Susan M. Richey, John M. Greabe, Keith M. Harrison, J. Jeffrey Hawley

Law Faculty Scholarship

Amicus brief filed by the Intellectual Property Amicus Brief Clinic of the University of New Hampshire School of Law with the United States Court Of Appeals For The Ninth Circuit regarding United States v. Xavier Alvarez, Docket No. 11-210

Keep The Poking To Yourself, Mrs. Robinson: The Missouri Facebook Statute And Its Implications For Teacher Free Speech Under The First Amendment, Alex Lehrer

Student Works

No abstract provided.

Public Corruption Concerns And Counter-Majoritarian Democracy Definition In Citizens United V. Federal Election Commission, Daaron Kimmel

Chicago-Kent Law Review

In determining the shape of the free speech rights and anti-corruption concerns that courts must balance in campaign finance cases, judges are influenced by their own underlying understandings of what an ideal democracy should look like. For judges to decide whether the government is appropriately regulating the political process, the rules that allow all citizens to interact with and shape their democracy, judges must first decide what that democracy ought to look like. This affords judges a great deal of discretion in campaign finance cases. Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission is a particularly bold judicial attempt to reshape the …

All A Twitter: Social Networking, College Athletes, And The First Amendment, Davis Walsh

William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal

No abstract provided.

False Valor: Amending The Stolen Valor Act To Conform With The First Amendment's Fraudulent Speech Exception, Jeffery C. Barnum

Washington Law Review

The Stolen Valor Act (SVA or “the Act”) was enacted to protect against “fraudulent claims” of receipt of military honors or decorations. It does so by criminalizing false verbal or written claims regarding such awards. However, the Act failed to include all of the elements of an anti-fraud measure required by the First Amendment. Most critically, the SVA fails to require actual reliance on the part of the defrauded. Although fraud is generally not protected by the First Amendment, courts cannot construe the SVA as an anti-fraud measure if the statute does not require actual reliance. Therefore, the SVA as …

When Does F*** Not Mean F***?: Fcc V. Fox Television Stations And A Call For Protecting Emotive Speech, W. Wat Hopkins

Federal Communications Law Journal

The Supreme Court of the United States does not always deal cogently with nontraditional language. The most recent example is FCC v. Fox Television Stations, in which the Justices became sidetracked into attempting to define the f-word and then to determine whether, when used as a fleeting expletive rather than repeatedly, the word is indecent for broadcast purposes. The Court would do well to avoid definitions and heed Justice John Marshall Harlan's advice in Cohen v. California to provide protection for the emotive, as well as the cognitive, element of speech

The "Strong Medicine" Of The Overbreadth Doctrine: When Statutory Exceptions Are No More Than A Placebo, Christopher A. Pierce

Federal Communications Law Journal

In United States v. Stevens, the United States Supreme Court invalidated a federal statute criminalizing the interstate sale and distribution of depictions of animal cruelty on First Amendment grounds. While Stevens demonstrates the Court's reluctance to create a new category of speech outside of First Amendment protection, Stevens also stands for the proposition that borrowing the exceptions clause from the Court's obscenity standard will not adequately protect a statute from invalidation as overbroad. This Note discusses the use of the obscenity standard's exceptions clause in nonobscenity statutes and the Court's treatment of the exceptions clause in Stevens. This Note concludes …

Campus Citizenship And Associational Freedom: An Aristolelian Take On The Nondiscrimination Puzzle, Chapin Cimino

William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal

Student expressive association on campus is a thorny thicket. Student affinity groups often choose to organize around a shared principle or characteristic of the groups’ members, which, by definition, makes those students different in some way from their peers. In order to preserve the group’s sense of uniqueness, these groups often then wish to control their own membership and voting policies. They feel, in essence, entitled to discriminate—a right arguably embodied by the First Amendment freedom of expressive association. When campus groups actually exercise this right, however, they run into university antidiscrimination policies, which can cost them official campus recognition. …

A Cure For Laryngitis: A First Amendment Challenge To The Nlra's Ban On Secondary Picketing, Joseph L. Guza

Buffalo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Humanitarian Law Project And The Supreme Court's Construction Of Terrorism, Wadie E. Said

BYU Law Review

No abstract provided.

Social Networks & Political Uprisings, Nima Astyani

Student Works

No abstract provided.