First Amendment Commons^™

Holmes's Understanding Of His Clear-And-Present-Danger Test: Why Exactly Did He Require Imminence?, Vincent A. Blasi

Faculty Scholarship

For all the suggestiveness and staying power of his market-in-ideas metaphor, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’s most significant influence on First Amendment law has turned out to be his notion that only imminent harm can justify punishment for expressions of opinion. This emphasis on the time dimension in the calculus of harm is now entrenched in modern doctrine. It is easy to imagine how First Amendment law might have developed differently had Holmes’s peculiar focus on imminence not been a factor in shaping how the freedom of speech has come to be understood in the United States.

Taking Stock Of The Religion Clauses, John D. Inazu

Scholarship@WashULaw

After a few decades of relative quiet, the Supreme Court has in recent years focused once again on the religion clauses and related statutes.

Conflicting Reports: When Gun Rights Threaten Free Speech, Gregory P. Magarian

Scholarship@WashULaw

This Article catalogs and analyzes collisions between free speech and gun rights. The most important and hotly debated of those collisions is the clash between the First Amendment rights to assemble and speak in public political protests and the asserted Second Amendment right to carry firearms openly in public places. Beyond protests, public university students’ First Amendment rights to speak and learn clash with the asserted Second Amendment right to carry concealed weapons on university campuses; First Amendment interests in robust political deliberation clash with Second Amendment interests in promoting and securing the right to keep and bear arms; and …

Taming Uncivil Discourse, Gregory P. Magarian, James L. Gibson, Lee Epstein

Scholarship@WashULaw

In an era of increasingly intense populist politics, a variety of issues of intergroup prejudice, discrimination, and conflict have moved center stage in American politics. Among these is “political correctness” and, in particular, what constitutes a legitimate discourse of political conflict and opposition. Yet the meaning of legitimate discourse is being turned on its head as some disparaged groups seek to reclaim, or re-appropriate, the slurs directed against them. Using a Supreme Court decision about whether “The Slants” – a band named after a traditional slur against Asians – can trademark its name, we test several hypotheses about re-appropriation processes, …

Private Schools' Role And Rights In Setting Vaccination Policy: A Constitutional And Statutory Puzzle, Hillel Y. Levin

Scholarly Works

Measles and other vaccine-preventable childhood diseases are making a comeback, as a growing number of parents are electing not to vaccinate their children. May private schools refuse admission to these students? This deceptively simple question raises complex issues of First Amendment law and statutory interpretation, and it also has implications for other current hot-button issues in constitutional law, including whether private schools may discriminate against LGBTQ students. This Article is the first to address the issue of private schools’ rights to exclude unvaccinated children. It finds that the answer is “it depends.” It also offers a model law that states …

First Amendment (Un)Exceptionalism: A Comparative Taxonomy Of Campaign Finance Reform Proposals In The United States And United Kingdom, Lori A. Ringhand

Scholarly Works

There is an urgent conversation happening among the world’s democracies about how to respond to the combined threat of online electioneering and foreign interference in domestic elections. Despite the shadow such activities cast over the 2016 presidential election in the United States, the US has been largely absent from comparative discussions about how to tackle the problem. This is not just because of a recalcitrant president. The assumption that America’s “First Amendment Exceptionalism” – the idea that American freedom of expression law is simply too much of an outlier to warrant useful comparative consideration – is strong on both sides …

All The Border's A Stage: Humanitarian Aid As Expressive Dissent, Jason A. Cade

Scholarly Works

Immigration enforcement along the Southwest border between the United States and Mexico has long channeled immigrants into perilous desert corridors, where many thousands have dies, out of the public view. In response to this humanitarian crisis, activists from organizations such as No More Deaths (NMD) trek deep into the treacherous desert, hoping to save lives, honor the remains of those who did not survive, and influence public opinion about border enforcement policies. NMD's activism is not merely utilitarian but also deeply expressive; ultimately, they hope to convey the message that all lives -- including those of unauthorized migrants-- are worth …

The Modern Fight For Media Freedom In The United States, Jonathan Peters

Scholarly Works

The First Amendment as a subject is challenging and provocative, and scholarly and popular understandings of it are changing. New communication technologies are pushing lawyers, judges, and scholars to revisit, and sometimes rethink, old legal doctrines and concepts. In the area of privacy, we have to think today about encryption and a website's terms of service. In the area of copyright, we have to think about peer-to-peer file sharing and the licenses granted by iTunes. In the area of sexual expression, we have to think about sexting, revenge porn, and deep fakes.'

This is the emerging state of play for …

Religious Freedom And The Churches: Contemporary Challenges In The United States Today, Richard W. Garnett

Journal Articles

A crucial, but often overlooked, dimension of the human and constitutional right to religious freedom is the autonomy of religious institutions, associations and societies with respect to matters of governance, doctrine, formation and membership. Although the Supreme Court of the United States has affirmed this autonomy in the context of American constitutional law, it is vulnerable, and even under threat, for a variety of reasons, including a general decline in the health of civil society and mediating associations and a crisis of confidence and authority caused by clerical sexual abuse and churches’ failure to respond to it.

Antitrust & Corruption: Overruling Noerr, Tim Wu

Faculty Scholarship

We live in a time when concerns about influence over the American political process by powerful private interests have reached an apogee, both on the left and the right. Among the laws originally intended to fight excessive private influence over republican institutions were the antitrust laws, whose sponsors were concerned not just with monopoly, but also its influence over legislatures and politicians. While no one would claim that the antitrust laws were meant to be comprehensive anti-corruption laws, there can be little question that they were passed with concerns about the political influence of powerful firms and industry cartels.

Since …

Fixing America's Founding, Maeve Glass

Faculty Scholarship

The forty-fifth presidency of the United States has sent lawyers reaching once more for the Founders’ dictionaries and legal treatises. In courtrooms, law schools, and media outlets across the country, the original meanings of the words etched into the U.S. Constitution in 1787 have become the staging ground for debates ranging from the power of a president to trademark his name in China to the rights of a legal permanent resident facing deportation. And yet, in this age when big data promises to solve potential challenges of interpretation and judges have for the most part agreed that original meaning should …

Drawing The Line: A First Amendment Framework For Partisan Gerrymandering In The Wake Of Rucho V. Common Cause, Kyle Keraga

Maryland Law Review

No abstract provided.

Overbey V. Mayor Of Baltimore: The Cost Of Silence And The Impact Of Restricting Speech In Police Brutality Settlements, Delaney E. Anderson

Maryland Law Review

No abstract provided.

Disinformation In The Marketplace Of Ideas, Tim Wu

Faculty Scholarship

It was just one line, nearly a throwaway; technically a subordinate clause. Yet that one clause from Oliver Wendell Holmes’s Abrams dissent breathed life into a metaphor, the “marketplace of ideas,” whose lasting power is undeniable. Nor is it difficult to understand why. Yes, it may be incomplete, inaccurate, and possibly cribbed from John Stuart Mill, but the metaphor matches something we all see. Ideas and ideological programs are out there looking for adherents or “buyers.” In Holmes’s time, progressives, socialists, and fascists courted supporters, just as similar groups do now. Specific ideas like the flat tax or the legalization …

"The Road I Can't Help Travelling": Holmes On Truth And Persuadability, Joseph Blocher

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Examining The Anomalies, Explaining The Value: Should The Usa Freedom Act’S Metadata Program Be Extended?, Susan Landau, Asaf Lubin

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Edward Snowden’s disclosure of National Security Agency (“NSA”) bulk collection of communications metadata was a highly disturbing shock to the American public. The intelligence community was surprised by the response, as it had largely not anticipated a strong negative public reaction to this surveillance program. Controversy over the bulk metadata collection led to the 2015 passage of the USA FREEDOM Act. The law mandated that the intelligence community would collect the Call Detail Records (“CDR”) from telephone service providers in strictly limited ways, not in bulk, and only under order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The new program initially …

The Law Of The Eruv, Michael Lewyn

Scholarly Works

Describes case law governing municipal regulation of the eruv (an artificial enclosure designed to allow observant Jews to carry on the Jewish Sabbath). The article focuses on First Amendment case law, and concludes that a municipality may prohibit eruvin only pursuant to a regulation that is enforced against comparable secular signs.

Symposium Introduction, William D. Araiza, Joel M. Gora

Brooklyn Law Review

On April 12, 2019, scholars gathered at Brooklyn Law School to consider the past, the present, and the future of free speech, and concerns about incitement that militate toward suppression. The speakers provided incisive and timely insight on these important matters—insight that is reflected in the papers published in this symposium issue of the Brooklyn Law Review. This introduction provides an overview of this symposium issue and the questions presented by each article.

In Defense Of Brandenburg: The Aclu And Incitement Doctrine In 1919, 1969, And 2019, Emerson J. Sykes

Brooklyn Law Review

In the United States, full-throated advocacy—even advocacy of violence—is protected by the First Amendment of the Constitution. Few other countries define “incitement to violence” as narrowly, and governments tend to exploit any authority to regulate speech. The ACLU has played a central role in developing America’s speech-protective modern incitement doctrine over the last century, sometimes by representing clients with abhorrent views, including in the landmark Brandenburg v. Ohio. The Brandenburg test sets a high bar for incitement that should be maintained, even with respect to online speech. Calls for increased regulation of speech should not be heeded.

Brandenburg And Terrorism In The Digital Age, David S. Han

Brooklyn Law Review

This essay explores the tension between the longstanding Brandenburg standard and the current technological context—one in which abstract advocacy of terrorist conduct, widely and cheaply disseminated through the internet and channeled through social media, has contributed to a number of devastating attacks such as the Orlando nightclub shooting, the Boston marathon bombings, and the shootings in San Bernardino. It does so through the lens of the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Carpenter v. United States—a Fourth Amendment case that similarly dealt with the collision between the longstanding constitutional righThis essay explores the tension between the longstanding Brandenburg standard and the …