First Amendment Commons^™

The Final Edit: Strategies For Legislative Success Of The Press Act And Strengthening The Protections Of Freedom Of The Press, Tess Theisen

Barry Law Review

No abstract provided.

Dignity And The Free Press, Erin C. Carroll

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

As American institutions wither and die, those who believe in their importance must reflect and rebuild. One institution worthy of sustained attention is the free press. Divorced from government by design, the press can benefit from efforts to reinvigorate and reinvent it in ways that institutions more directly under the federal government’s thumb cannot. To best undertake these efforts, we need a richer understanding of why a free press is vital. Articulating the values that underlie the need for this institution is necessary not only to build the most robust free press, but also to best exercise our freedoms as …

Too Cruel For School: How Parental Rights Doctrine Can Help Protect Against Book Bans, Tessa K. Wild

William & Mary Law Review

This Note argues that parents’ rights protections are crucial to protecting against broad censorship in public schools, and that if states want to effectively regulate book removals, they should preemptively adopt laws similar to Minnesota’s section 134.51.

[...]

Part I of this Note will provide background information about book removals as a freedom of speech issue, as well as a history of how parents’ rights rhetoric is tied to book-removal issues. Part II will address both the history and legal standards of parents’ rights protections. Finally, Part III, using Minnesota and Utah as case studies, will apply parents’ rights law …

Vaccines, Religious Liberty, And The Gvr As Doctrinal Signal, Zalman Rothschild

Articles

This Essay proceeds in four Parts. Part I traces the doctrinal baseline, showing that vaccines have long functioned as the limit case for religious liberty. Part II briefly describes the doctrinal changes of the COVID-19 era — the Supreme Court’s expansion of religious equality doctrine, and its emergency-docket denials that left vaccine mandates formally unresolved — before explaining why the GVR in Miller signals a different move: the extension of the religious liberty framework to vaccine mandates, bypassing the comparability analysis that had allowed most courts to sustain them under the equality model. Part III turns to Miller itself and …

A Constitutional Black Box: Critically Assessing The Constitutional And Algorithmic Implications Of The Netchoice Cases, Sam Merkatz

Bates College Undergraduate Law Review

In 2024, the Supreme Court of the United States jointly heard Moody v. NetChoice, LLC and NetChoice, LLC v. Paxton, cases challenging Florida and Texas statutes that restricted the capacity of social media platforms to moderate content. While remanding the cases, the Court reaffirmed that content moderation and curation qualify as protected expression under the First Amendment. This paper critically assesses the Court's majority opinion and its nonbinding dicta regarding the expressive nature of algorithmic moderation.

Specifically, drawing on Justice Alito’s concurrence in judgement only, this paper argues that the Court fails to account for fundamental differences between traditional …

It's The Night Of The Living Deepfakes: The Threat Of Deepfakes On The Film Industry, Neki Shero

DePaul Business & Commercial Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Front Matter

DePaul Business & Commercial Law Journal

No abstract provided.

The Freedom To Be Bound: Anti-Discrimination Theology And The Ministerial Exception, Brooke Girley

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

The ministerial exception is generally seen as safeguarding the autonomy of religious institutions in employment decisions, but does it also serve as a roadblock to religious freedom? The recent dismissal of the gender discrimination lawsuit by Rev. Dr. Eboni Marshall Turman against the historic Abyssinian Baptist Church calls into question whether the breadth of the exception promotes religious freedom in all contexts. This article argues that the ministerial exception, although designed to protect religious autonomy, may paradoxically undermine that very autonomy when applied to faith communities, like Abyssinian, that have voluntarily embraced anti-discrimination as part of their theology and praxis. …

Las Vegas Review-Journal, Inc V. Eighth Judicial Dist. Ct., 142 Nev. Adv. Op. 31 (April 23, 2026), Randolph Anderson

Nevada Supreme Court Summaries

Prior restraints or gag orders may be imposed only if they are narrowly tailored and the least restrictive means available to prevent a clear and present danger.

Trademark’S Parody Problem, Christine Haight Farley

Research Reports & White Papers

This Article challenges the Supreme Court's recent assurance that trademark parody is adequately protected under ordinary infringement doctrine without the need for special speech safeguards. In Jack Daniel's Properties, Inc. v. VIP Products LLC, the Court curtailed the principal First Amendment defense for expressive trademark uses while predicting that parodies would nonetheless prevail under the likelihood of confusion test. This Article shows why that prediction is mistaken. Drawing on recent case law and trademark doctrine, it identifies four structural vulnerabilities that now confront parody: the expansion of "trademark use" as a gatekeeping device that excludes parodists from speech-protective …

"The Silence Of The Farms": Suppressing Speech And Trampling Transparency To Shield Big Ag, Erin Okuno

Texas A&M Law Review

Do you really know where your last meal came from and whether it was safe to eat? Most people are not aware of the often appalling conditions at agricultural production facilities (aptly known as “factory farms”), including worker injuries and abuse, contaminated food, and environmental pollution, as well as the horrific ways in which the animals are kept, raised, and slaughtered. In the face of these concerning conditions and alarmingly frequent food recalls—including millions of pounds of contaminated meat—it would seem prudent to increase transparency at factory farms, but historically, they have operated behind a shield of secrecy due to …

The Justice Department’S Bid To Avoid Accountability, Bruce A. Green, Rebecca Roiphe

Other Publications

No abstract provided.

In Defense Of The Ten Commandments In Public Spaces: An Analysis Based On The Supreme Court’S New Judicial Standard, Songfeng Li

Arkansas Law Review

On June 19, 2024, Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry signed legislation mandating the display of the Ten Commandments in all public K-12 schools and colleges in the state. On June 21, 2024, Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick announced his intention to introduce a similar bill in the next legislative session that would require the display of the Ten Commandments in schools. Immediately after the Louisiana law’s enactment, a group of local parents with the help of multiple organizations filed a federal lawsuit seeking to block its implementation. As of today, the district court and appellate court have issued differing rulings. The …

Pronouns On The Clock: The Eleventh Circuit’S Broad Limitation Of Teacher Speech In Wood V. Florida Department Of Education, Carter E. Pannell

Mercer Law Review

Few settings test the limits of free speech more sharply than public schools, where questions of personal identity, government authority, and constitutional rights often intersect. Because the government has an interest in regulating what its employees do and say, First Amendment protections afforded to government employees are diluted in comparison to those afforded to private citizens. A contemporary example of this tension is the question of whether the government may regulate a public-school teacher’s use of pronouns or titles in their own classroom.

In 2023, Florida enacted a statute forbidding teachers from using pronouns or titles that differ from the …

New York Times V. Sullivan Protects Freedom Of The Press Against Seditious Libel, Not Against Personal Libel, Louis W. Hensler Iii

Mercer Law Review

Justice Clarence Thomas appears to be on a mission to reconsider the actual malice standard adopted sixty years ago by the Supreme Court of the United States in New York Times v. Sullivan. And Thomas has not been a lone voice crying in the wilderness—others also have questioned New York Times. While New York Times represents a big shift in the law for those cases to which it applies, the scope of its precise holding is relatively narrow—New York Times protects publications about the official conduct of public officials.

Moreover, focusing on the precise facts in the New York Times …

Lyrics On Lockdown: An Analysis Of The Admissibility Of Rap Lyrics Under The Rules Of Evidence And The First Amendment, Lucious M. Moore

Mercer Law Review

“Freddy Mercury did not confess to having ‘just killed a man’ by putting ‘a gun against his head’ and ‘pulling the trigger.’ Bob Marley did not confess to having shot a sheriff. And Johnny Cash did not confess to shooting ‘a man in Reno, just to watch him die.’” However, a troubling trend in state and federal courts across the country is that rap lyrics are not being granted the same protections and latitudes that other forms of artistic expressions are afforded. In a movement that is shocking—yet formulaic—creators of rap music are seeing their lyrics used against them in …

Silencing Liberty: Why Curtailing Noncitizens' Speech Is Un-American, Erin Gray

Immigration and Human Rights Law Review

Since the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel thousands of students across the world protested Israel’s involvement in the war on Gaza. Many of these protests occurred at American universities. When President Trump returned to the White House in 2025, he publicly threatened to and deport noncitizen students who participated in these protests. Following through with his promise, President Trump revoked multiple students’ visas after they participated in some form of Pro-Palestine advocacy. This Article explores whether President Trump’s actions are constitutional under the First Amendment. Ultimately, this Article concludes that President Trump violated the First Amendment by targeting noncitizen …

A Real Account Of Deep Fakes, Benjamin L.W Sobel

Michigan Law Review

Laws regulating pornographic deepfakes are written to prohibit “digital forgeries,” “false” images, or media “indistinguishable” from “authentic” recordings. Yet the typical anti-deepfake law covers materials that aren’t forgeries, aren’t false, and that reasonable observers can easily distinguish from authentic recordings. Though drafted as if they regulate statements of fact, anti-deepfake laws actually target certain outrageous depictions per se—and rightly so, because pornographic deepfakes cause harm irrespective of their truth or falsity. However, the inapposite language of facts results in statutes with crucial ambiguities. Moreover, because anti-deepfake laws ban outrageous depictions irrespective of the factual assertions they make, they differ fundamentally …

What Common Themes Are Challengers Trying To Silence And What Would Be Lost Without Them?, Corrine H. Martello

Richard T. Schellhase Essay Prize in Ethics

This research paper aims to analyze the controversies surrounding The Catcher in the Rye, written by J.D. Salinger, The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison, and The Perks of Being a Wallflower, by Stephen Chbosky, three commonly challenged books that are often found in high school English classes, in order to answer the question “what themes in these books are challengers trying to silence, and what would be lost without them?”. It will be broken into four sections, Alienation, Mental Health Struggles & Trauma, The Loss of Innocence, and Exploring Identity, which are common themes presented in all three books. …

United States Response To Questionnaire: Alai Congress 2026 - Copyright And Free Expression In The Age Of Algorithms, Philippa Loengard

Kernochan Center for Law, Media, and the Arts

ALAI-USA is the U.S. branch of ALAI (Association Littèraire et Artistique Internationale). ALAI-USA was started in the 1980's by the late Professor Melville B. Nimmer, and was later expanded by Professor John M. Kernochan.