Archive for the ‘First Amendment’ Category

Purdy on Civil Disobedience

posted by Frank Pasquale

The “Moral Monday” protests at the North Carolina legislature have included religious leaders, teachers, and many concerned citizens. Law professor Jedediah Purdy reflects on his participation here:

Because North Carolina refused the Obamacare Medicaid expansion, I ended up in handcuffs in the Wake County Detention Center. That was my trigger, anyway. Statistically, next year more than two thousand people in the state will die who would have lived if North Carolina had accepted federal money to give health insurance to low-income families. (That’s our share of an estimated 19,000 preventable deaths nationwide in the 14 states that have rejected the expansion.) Because the state legislature was doing that in my name, I decided I needed to stand in front of it, at least until they took me away.

I can’t add much to Purdy’s article, except to say: what are own personal “red lines,” or government/corporate activities (and let’s not kid ourselves—that merger is the core, fused nature of power these days) that seem too egregiously wrong to let pass without personally protesting them? And given how frequently both right and left lament the “brokenness” of government, is Bernard Harcourt right to suggest that political disobedience is gradually displacing civil disobedience?

  June 12, 2013 at 9:47 am   Posted in: Civil Rights, First Amendment   Print This Post   10 Comments

LSA Retro-Recap Days 2-3: Leisure, Law & Econ, and Liberalism

posted by Stephen Galoob

Day 2 of the conference saw a spirited panel (featuring Scott Shaprio, Ken Ehrenberg, Michael Guidice, and Brian Tamanaha) about the (ir)reconcilability of legal anthropology and sociolegal studies with analytic jurisprudence. Much of the discussion (not to mention the spirit) here concerned the appropriate definition of a “concept.” If that kind of question does not induce somnolence for you, then read on! Read the rest of this post »

  June 6, 2013 at 5:28 pm   Posted in: Conferences, Criminal Law, Economic Analysis of Law, First Amendment, Legal Theory   Print This Post   2 Comments

Albany Law Review Symposium “What Are We Saying? Violence, Vulgarity, Lies . . . And The Importance Of 21st Century Free Speech”

posted by Danielle Citron

The Albany Law Review had a terrific symposium on free speech. Here is their description of the symposium and the links to the excellent pieces.

In recent years, the United States Supreme Court has issued a number of head-turning decisions regarding freedom of speech under the First Amendment. Taken as a whole, some might say that the Roberts Court appears somewhat schizophrenic on free speech and expression issues. This is the Court that stretched the boundaries of free speech, recognizing First Amendment protections for selling violent video games to minors, lying about receiving military honors, protesting at the funerals of soldiers, and–perhaps most controversially of all–contributing to political campaigns through independent expenditures by corporations and unions. Yet this is also the Court that constrained free speech by saying that the First Amendment did not protect a district attorney who criticized a policy set by his supervisor, that the First Amendment did not protect high school students punished for posting remarks on the Internet outside school grounds, and that the First Amendment did not protect a humanitarian aid organization that provided non-violent educational materials to a group deemed by the U.S. government to be a threat. Clearly, a split record with some interesting lines that appear to be drawn. This symposium examines these recent decisions by the Roberts Court, exploring both the impact of these decisions and the direction in which the Supreme Court really seems to be going on matters of free expression. Leading First Amendment scholars and advocates grapple with some of the major modern issues in this area: academic freedom, modern-day limits on “hate speech,” government stifling of political dissent, restrictions on free expression on the Internet and on television, First Amendment problems in  criminal conspiracy laws. Additionally, the symposium includes two transcripts of lively discussions on free speech issues: a debate between First Amendment heavyweights Floyd Abrams and Alan B. Morrison on Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, and a panel discussion about the Roberts Court’s free speech jurisprudence moderated by NY Times Supreme Court correspondent Adam Liptak. Through these articles and transcripts, we provide a look through the eyes of experts at what the Roberts Court really is saying about contemporary freedom of speech, and a series of viewpoints on whether this direction really is favorable for our modern society.”

Ronald K.L. Collins……Foreword: Exceptional Freedom—The Roberts Court, the First Amendment, and the New Absolutism

Robert M. O’Neil ………Hate Speech, Fighting Words, and Beyond–Why American Law is Unique

Rodney A. Smolla……..Categories, Tiers of Review, and the Roiling Sea of Free Speech Doctrine and Principle: A Methodological Critique of United States v. Alvarez

Jeffery C. Barnum………Encouraging Congress to Encourage Speech: Reflections on United States v. Alvarez

Marjorie Heins……….The Supreme Court and Political Speech in the 21st Century: The Implications of Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project

R. George Wright………Are There First Amendment “Vacuums?”: The Case of the Free Speech Challenge to Tobacco Package Labeling Requirement

Robert D. Richards & David J. Weinert………Punting in the First Amendment’s Red Zone: The Supreme Court’s “Indecision” on the FCC’s Indecency Regulations Leaves Broadcasters Still Searching For Answers

Marvin Ammori & Luke Pelican………Media Diversity and Online Advertising

Martin H. Redish & Michael J.T. Downey………Criminal Conspiracy as Free Expression

Owen Fiss……..The Democratic Mission of the University

Welcome & Opening Remarks…….Benjamin P. Pomerance

Debate on Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission…….Floyd Abrams and Alan B. Morrison, moderated by Ronald K.L. Collins

Panel Discussion on Recent U.S. Supreme Court Free Speech Cases and Their Implications……Adam Liptak (moderator), Ronald K.L. Collins, Susan N. Herman, Alan B. Morrison, Robert M. O’Neil, Robert D. Richards

  May 2, 2013 at 12:34 pm   Posted in: Administrative Announcements, First Amendment   Print This Post   No Comments

Free speech rights and free speech pedagogy

posted by Aaron Saiger

I am working on a paper about student speech rights in public school that has me vacillating about whether the classic Supreme Court case of Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District (1969) is a brilliant exercise in linedrawing or an utter failure. Many readers will remember that Tinker held that students could wear black armbands to school in silent protest of American involvement in hostilities in Vietnam; school officials may interfere with or punish speech only if  they reasonably forecast that it will “materially or substantially interfer[e] with the requirements of appropriate discipline in the operation of the school or collide with the rights of others.”  The Tinker rule has the nice feature of explaining why a student cannot answer a teacher’s question “What were the results of Irish potato famine?” with “US Out of Vietnam!” while she can say the same thing in the hallway. More broadly, Tinker establishes a certain kind of pedagogical regime for the hours that students spend in-school-but-not-in-class, one where students can learn how to exercise constitutional rights by practicing them, up to the point of disruption.

Tinker’s flaws were made vivid once again this week by yet another case, this one from the Fourth Circuit, involving students being prohibited from and punished for wearing to school clothing that bears the likeness of Confederate flags. Such behavior seems initially very similar to wearing a black armband to protest Vietnam; but the courts of appeals have fairly consistently held that such speech can be barred under Tinker because histories of racial tension make it reasonable for school authorities to expect disruption to result from such displays. The new case, Hardwick v. Heyward, is quite emphatic on this score, emphasizing that the mere fact that the shirts did not lead to disruption is immaterial, because it was reasonable for school officials to predict disruption; moreover past racial disputes in the school were material, because they made the prediction more reasonable. The Hardwick rationale pretty clearly means that, had there once been fistfights in the Des Moines schools about the Vietnam War, or perhaps even World War II, then the armbands could have been banned in the present. Thus Tinker is deployed to create a particularly strong kind of hecklers’ veto.

My gut reaction to this case is — who is fooling whom? Read the rest of this post »

  March 30, 2013 at 10:17 pm   Posted in: Civil Rights, Constitutional Law, Education, First Amendment, Race   Print This Post   4 Comments

Netflix, Facebook, and Social Sharing

posted by Deven Desai

Just as Neil Richards’s The Perils of Social Reading (101 Georgetown Law Journal 689 (2013)) is out in final form, Netflix released its new social sharing features in partnership with that privacy protector, Facebook. Not that working with Google, Apple, or Microsoft would be much better. There may be things I am missing. But I don’t see how turning on this feature is wise given that it seems to require you to remember not to share in ways that make sharing a bit leakier than you may want.

Apparently one has to connect your Netflix account to Facebook to get the feature to work. The way it works after that link is made poses problems.

According to SlashGear two rows appear. One is called Friends’ Favorites tells you just that. Now, consider that the algorithm works in part by you rating movies. So if you want to signal that odd documentaries, disturbing art movies, guilty pleasures (this one may range from The Hangover to Twilight), are of interest, you should rate them highly. If you turn this on, are all old ratings shared? And cool! Now everyone knows that you think March of the Penguins and Die Hard are 5 stars. The other button:

is called “Watched By Your Friends,” and it consists of movies and shows that your friends have recently watched. It provides a list of all your Facebook friends who are on Netflix, and you can cycle through individual friends to see what they recently watched. This is an unfiltered list, meaning that it shows all the movies and TV shows that your friends have agreed to share.

Of course, you can control what you share and what you don’t want to share, so if there’s a movie or TV show that you watch, but you don’t want to share it with your friends, you can simply click on the “Don’t Share This” button under each item. Netflix is rolling out the feature over the next couple of days, and the company says that all US members will have access to Netflix social by the end of the week.

Right. So imagine you forget that your viewing habits are broadcast. And what about Roku or other streaming devices? How does one ensure that the “Don’t Share” button is used before the word goes out that you watched one, two, or three movies on drugs, sex, gay culture, how great guns are, etc.?

As Richards puts it, “the ways in which we set up the defaults for sharing matter a great deal. Our reader records implicate
our intellectual privacy—the protection of reading from surveillance and interference so that we can read freely, widely, and without inhibition.” So too for video and really any information consumption.

  March 17, 2013 at 6:02 pm   Posted in: Anonymity, Cyberlaw, First Amendment, Privacy, Privacy (Consumer Privacy), Technology, Web 2.0   Print This Post   One Comment

“Mutual Adjustment” as (merely) congruence delayed

posted by Rick Garnett

I am delighted by and grateful for the opportunity to participate in the Concurring Opinions symposium on Jim and Linda’s engaging, important, and challenging new book, Ordered Liberty.  And, the contributions so far have managed the tough task of enriching what was already the very welcome opportunity to read and think about the book.

I have — like Linda and Jim, though I’m sure not with their success — tried to think and write about “civil society” and “seedbeds of virtue” (here), about the tension and even conflicts between liberty and equality (here), and about the moral and legal rights of parents to direct and control — within some limits — the education of their children (here). Ordered Liberty has given me a needed opportunity to re-visit and re-think some of what I’ve said and thought, and I’m sure that process will continue.

At the end of the day, and at the end of the book, I suppose there’s no avoiding the fact that I continue to have doubts about “constitutional liberalism” as Jim and Linda present and defend it; I continue to think that the Constitution is best regarded primarily, and more prosaically, as a mechanism for (limited-purpose and limited-reach) lawmaking, the operation of which is constrained by “negative” rights-protections; I think that the claims of families, associations, and churches to remain out-of-sync with current political majorities, or with liberalism more generally, are even stronger than Jim and Linda acknowledge; and I think that those scholars who “are preoccupied with the limited institutional capacities of courts” are, well, probably right to be so.  But, it probably does not add much to this symposium simply to report my hard-headedness or general reservations.

So, a more focused thought on a particular part of the book:  In Chapter 6 (“Conflicts between Liberty and Equality”), Linda and Jim use four familiar cases (Roberts, Dale, Bob Jones, and Christian Legal Society) to “illustrate the struggles between the formative projects of civil society and government and between competing visions of diversity and pluralism.”  Fair enough — these case do indeed illustrate these struggles.  But, at the end of the chapter, and at the end of book, I didn’t feel like I had been given or had found what I thought was promised, i.e., “a framework for resolving clashes of rights so as to promote ordered liberty and equality citizenship for all.”  That is, despite the use of the term “mutual adjustment”, it did not appear to me that what was presented in the concluding pages and paragraphs of the chapter was so much a “framework” for resolving the described clashes through pluralism-appreciating “adjustment” as it was a declaration that the ultimate and to-be-desired resolution of these clashes in favor of the “liberal” position will often be facilitated by “prudential” “interim” strategies like religious exemptions.  To be told by the liberal-constitutional state that — not to worry — it is willing to go slow in bringing dissenting or just different associations into congruence will not, I imagine, be very comforting to those who wonder why that state assumes it has the legitimate authority to insist on congruence now or later.

  March 1, 2013 at 4:34 pm   Posted in: Constitutional Law, First Amendment, Religion, Symposium (Ordered Liberty)   Print This Post   No Comments

Call for Papers: the First Freedom of Expression Scholars Conference at YLS

posted by Danielle Citron

Exciting scholarly opportunity from the Yale Information Society Project:

The Information Society Project at Yale Law School will host the first Freedom of Expression Scholars Conference (FESC) at Yale Law School on May 4-5, 2013. The FESC is sponsored by the Abrams Institute for Freedom of Expression.The conference brings scholars together to discuss their works-in-progress concerning freedom of speech, expression, press, association, petition, assembly, and related issues of knowledge and information policy.

The conference offers participants an opportunity to receive substantive feedback through group discussion. Each accepted paper will be assigned a discussant, who will lead discussion and provide feedback to the author. Participants will be expected to read papers in advance, and to attend the entire conference.

Participation in the conference is by invitation only. Titles and abstracts of papers should be submitted electronically to bryan.choi@yale.edu no later than February 22, 2013. Those interested in serving as discussants should also contact bryan.choi@yale.edu. Workshop versions of papers are due on April 5, 2013 so that they can be circulated to people attending the conference.

  January 31, 2013 at 12:31 pm   Posted in: Cyberlaw, First Amendment   Print This Post   No Comments

Stanford Law Review Online: Privilege and the Belfast Project

posted by Stanford Law Review

The Stanford Law Review Online has just published a Note by Will Havemann entitled Privilege and the Belfast Project. Havemann argues that a recent First Circuit opinion goes too far and threatens the idea of academic privilege:

In 2001, two Irish scholars living in the United States set out to compile the recollections of men and women involved in the decades-long conflict in Northern Ireland. The result was the Belfast Project, an oral history project housed at Boston College that collected interviews from many who were personally involved in the violent Northern Irish “Troubles.” To induce participants to document their memories for posterity, Belfast Project historians promised all those interviewed that the contents of their testimonials would remain confidential until they died. More than a decade later, this promise of confidentiality is at the heart of a legal dispute implicating the United States’ bilateral legal assistance treaty with the United Kingdom, the so-called academic’s privilege, and the First Amendment.

He concludes:

Given the confusion sown by Branzburg’s fractured opinion, the First Circuit’s hardnosed decision is unsurprising. But by disavowing the balancing approach recommended in Justice Powell’s concurring Branzburg opinion, and by overlooking the considerable interests supporting the Belfast Project’s confidentiality guarantee, the First Circuit erred both as a matter of precedent and of policy. At least one Supreme Court Justice has signaled a willingness to correct the mischief done by the First Circuit, and to clarify an area of First Amendment law where the Court’s guidance is sorely needed. The rest of the Court should take note.

Read the full article, Privilege and the Belfast Project at the Stanford Law Review Online.

  December 5, 2012 at 10:45 am  Tags: academic privilege, academy, Civil Rights, Constitutional Law, First Amendment, international law, privilege, treaties  Posted in: Anonymity, Civil Rights, Constitutional Law, Current Events, First Amendment, International & Comparative Law, Law Rev (Stanford), Media Law   Print This Post   15 Comments

The Yale Law Journal Online: Lawrence Meets Libel

posted by Yale Law Journal

The Yale Law Journal Online has just published Lawrence Meets Libel: Squaring Constitutional Norms with Sexual-Orientation Defamation, an essay by Anthony Michael Kreis. Kreis identifies a trend in defamation law: many state statutes and judicial opinions continue to treat false allegations of homosexuality as actionable libel despite the growing acceptance of homosexuality nationwide. He argues that, “[w]hile defamation law functions as a legitimate governmental mechanism for vindicating harm to one’s reputation, it cannot constitutionally do so if it irrationally intertwines state action with class-based animus.” In his view, “recent sexual-orientation jurisprudence . . . stands for the clear proposition that government-backed stigmatization of gay and lesbian people is inconsistent with the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.” 

  November 19, 2012 at 3:00 pm   Posted in: Constitutional Law, First Amendment, Law Rev (Yale), LGBT, Uncategorized   Print This Post   No Comments

Stanford Law Review Online: Software Speech

posted by Stanford Law Review

The Stanford Law Review Online has just published a Note by Andrew Tutt entitled Software Speech. Tutt argues that current approaches to determining when software or speech generated by software can be protected by the First Amendment are incorrect:

When is software speech for purposes of the First Amendment? This issue has taken on new life amid recent accusations that Google used its search rankings to harm its competitors. This spring, Eugene Volokh coauthored a white paper explaining why Google’s search results are fully protected speech that lies beyond the reach of the antitrust laws. The paper sparked a firestorm of controversy, and in a matter of weeks, dozens of scholars, lawyers, and technologists had joined the debate. The most interesting aspect of the positions on both sides—whether contending that Google search results are or are not speech—is how both get First Amendment doctrine only half right.

He concludes:

By stopping short of calling software “speech,” entirely and unequivocally, the Court would acknowledge the many ways in which software is still an evolving cultural phenomenon unlike others that have come before it. In discarding tests for whether software is speech on the basis of its literal resemblance either to storytelling (Brown) or information dissemination (Sorrell), the Court would strike a careful balance between the legitimate need to regulate software, on the one hand, and the need to protect ideas and viewpoints from manipulation and suppression, on the other.

Read the full article, Software Speech at the Stanford Law Review Online.

  November 15, 2012 at 10:18 am  Tags: Constitutional Law, Cyber Civil Rights, First Amendment, search engines, technology, videogames  Posted in: Constitutional Law, Cyber Civil Rights, Cyberlaw, First Amendment, Google & Search Engines, Google and Search Engines, Law Rev (Stanford), Supreme Court, Technology   Print This Post   3 Comments

The Contraception Mandate Part II

posted by Caroline Mala Corbin

In my last post, I argued that the requirement that religiously affiliated organizations include contraception in their health insurance plans does not violate the Free Exercise Clause. That’s not such a hard argument to make given the Employment Division v. Smith rule that neutral laws of general applicability are constitutional, no matter what kind of burden they may create for religious practices.

The Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), on the other hand, is easier to violate. RFRA was passed in reaction to Employment Division v. Smith. Congress wanted to restore the more demanding (at least on paper) pre-Smith test for religious liberty claims. The Supreme Court struck down RFRA  as applied to the states but not as applied to the federal government. Under RFRA, a federal law cannot impose a substantial burden on a person’s exercise of religion unless it passes strict scrutiny.

Saving the question of whether the contraception mandate imposes a substantial burden for another post, would it pass strict scrutiny? Does the contraception mandate advance a compelling state interest in a narrowly tailored way? It is not hard to come up with compelling reasons why women who do not want to become pregnant should have access to contraception. Women’s ability to control their reproduction is essential to their wellbeing, their bodily integrity, and their ability to participate as equals in the social, economic, and political life of the nation. In fact, the failure to cover contraception may well amount to sex discrimination if a health insurance plan covers all basic preventive care except for pregnancy-related preventive care like contraception. (While pregnancy discrimination is not considered sex discrimination for equal protection purposes thanks to Geduldig v. Aiello, it is sex discrimination for Title VII purposes thanks to the Pregnancy Discrimination Act.) Promoting women’s health, liberty, equality, and equal access to health care are all compelling state interests.

Nevertheless, at least one court has concluded that the contraception mandate was not motivated by a compelling interest because it contains too many exceptions, such as the ones for grandfathered plans and small employers. So, while the court acknowledged that “the promotion of public health” is generally a compelling state interest, it held that “any such argument is undermined by the existence of numerous exceptions to the preventive care coverage mandate. . . . A law cannot be regarded as protecting an interest of the highest order when it leaves appreciable damage to that supposedly vital interest unprohibited.” I disagree. The number of exceptions might matter if there were some question about whether the state’s interest really was compelling or not. If we are not sure about the importance of uniform appearance among police officers, numerous exceptions to grooming requirements might lead to the conclusion that it is not as important as the state claims. However, such exceptions should not matter when the state’s goals have long been recognized as compelling — and surely we are past the point of debating whether promoting women’s liberty and equality and preventing sex discrimination are compelling state interests.

Perhaps, then, it could be argued that the law is not narrowly tailored. How strict the tailoring must be under RFRA in not clear. If RFRA is meant to reinstate the pre-Smith test as practiced, then it is not very demanding, since the Supreme Court rarely found that laws failed strict scrutiny in Free Exercise Clause challenges. In any case, one argument that should be rejected is that the law is not sufficiently tailored because the government could provide contraception instead. But that can’t be right. Imagine a bookstore that refused admittance to Hispanics. Or imagine an employer whose insurance covered cancer screenings for white employees but not Asian ones. Now imagine the bookstore or employer arguing that a law banning race discrimination in places of public accommodation or in the provision of employment benefits fails strict scrutiny because the state could sell the books or provide the benefits instead. Such a claim is a distortion of strict scrutiny and should fail.

  November 2, 2012 at 11:05 am  Tags: contraception, contraception mandate, health care, religious liberty, RFRA, women  Posted in: Constitutional Law, Feminism and Gender, First Amendment, Health Law, Religion   Print This Post   5 Comments

The Contraception Mandate Part I

posted by Caroline Mala Corbin

The Affordable Care Act is changing the health care landscape. Among the changes is that employers that provide health insurance must cover preventive services, including contraception. Although the requirement does not apply to religious organizations, it does apply to religiously affiliated ones. This “contraception mandate” has generated a huge outcry from some religious leaders, most notably the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. They insist that forcing Catholic hospitals, schools, or charities to include contraception in their employee insurance plans violates religious liberty.

It doesn’t. It certainly doesn’t violate the Free Exercise Clause. After Employment Division v. Smith, neutral laws of general applicability are constitutional, regardless of the burden they may impose on religious practices. Indeed, the law upheld in Smith banned a religious sacrament. But it was neutral, in that it did not intentionally target religion, and it was generally applicable, in that it was neither riddled with exceptions nor grossly underinclusive. The regulation requiring employers who provide health insurance to include contraception in that coverage is likewise a neutral law of general applicability.

While a recent Supreme Court decision (Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. EEOC) carved out an exception to this “neutral-generally-applicable-laws-do-not-violate-the-Free-Exercise-Clause” rule, it does not apply here. This exception — which holds that religious institutions are immune from neutral, generally applicable anti-discrimination laws when they are sued by their ministers — was designed to protect churches’ ability to pick their leaders without interference from the state. However, the provision by religiously-affiliated organizations of health insurance to their employees, many of whom do not belong to the same faith as their religious employer, clearly does not involve ministers or internal church governance. In short, there is no valid Free Exercise Claim.

What about the Religious Freedom Restoration Act? Stay tuned.

  October 29, 2012 at 1:52 pm  Tags: ACA, contraception, contraception mandate, equality, free exercise, health care, religious liberty, women  Posted in: Civil Rights, Constitutional Law, Employment Law, Feminism and Gender, First Amendment, Health Law, Religion   Print This Post   19 Comments

Stanford Law Review Online: Dahlia v. Rodriguez

posted by Stanford Law Review

The Stanford Law Review Online has just published a Note by Kendall Turner entitled Dahlia v. Rodriguez: A Chance to Overrule Dangerous Precedent. Turner argues that the Ninth Circuit has an opportunity to make an important change to the rules governing the application of First Amendment protections to the speech of public employees:

In December 2007, Angelo Dahlia, a detective for the City of Burbank, California, allegedly witnessed his fellow police officers using unlawful interrogation tactics. According to Dahlia, these officers beat multiple suspects, squeezed the throat of one suspect, and placed a gun directly under that suspect’s eye. The Burbank Chief of Police seemed to encourage this behavior: after learning that certain suspects were not yet under arrest, he allegedly urged his employees to “beat another [suspect] until they are all in custody.”

After some delay, Dahlia reported his colleagues’ conduct to the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department. Four days later, Burbank’s Chief of Police placed Dahlia on administrative leave. Dahlia subsequently filed a 42 U.S.C. § 1983 action against the Chief and other members of the Burbank Police Department, alleging that his placement on administrative leave was unconstitutional retaliation for the exercise of his First Amendment rights.

She concludes:

Dahlia offers the Ninth Circuit an opportunity to overturn Huppert and articulate a narrow understanding of Garcetti. This narrow understanding accords with the reality of public employees’ duties—for the duties they are actually expected to perform may differ significantly from the responsibilities listed in their job descriptions. A narrow reading of Garcetti is also essential to ensuring adequate protection of free speech: The answer to the question of when the First Amendment protects a public employee’s statements made pursuant to his official duties may not be “always,” but it cannot be “never.”

Read the full article, Dahlia v. Rodriguez: A Chance to Overrule Dangerous Precedent at the Stanford Law Review Online.

  October 22, 2012 at 10:39 am  Tags: Civil Rights, Constitutional Law, employee speech.public employees, First Amendment, Ninth Circuit  Posted in: Civil Rights, Constitutional Law, Employment Law, First Amendment, Law Rev (Stanford)   Print This Post   No Comments

An Accommodation Too Far

posted by Caroline Mala Corbin

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) has been leading the charge against the contraception mandate, but its opposition to the mandate does not represent the USCCB’s first entanglement with contraception lawsuits. ACLU of Massachusetts v. Sebelius involved an Establishment Clause challenge to a grant given to the USCCB pursuant to the Trafficking Victims Protection Act. The grant was to provide services to victims of sex trafficking, who are often forced into prostitution and forced to endure rape or other sexual abuse. In accepting the grant, the USCCB made very clear that its religious beliefs prevented them from providing contraception or abortion to their clients, or referring them to others who would. (More specifically, the USCCB stated it would bar its subcontractors from providing or referring these services.) Even though access to contraception and abortion are crucial for women and girls who have been sexually trafficked, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) nonetheless awarded the USCCB over $15 million dollars. The ACLU sued, alleging Establishment Clause violations. USCCB responded by claiming that HHS was merely accommodating its sincere religious beliefs. The ACLU won.

Sometimes the line between constitutional accommodation of religious belief and unconstitutional advancement of religion can be hard to draw. Sometimes, however, it is not. HHS should never have awarded the grant. It is true that religious groups may now compete on an equal basis with secular groups for government grants and contracts. But they should also be rejected on an equal basis if they cannot fulfill basic grant requirements. The point of the grant, after all, is to help the intended beneficiaries. Any group, secular or religious, that cannot provide the requisite services, which in this case includes contraception and abortion, is simply not qualified. To accommodate the USCCB at the expense of trafficked sex victims goes too far. At this point, “accommodation devolve[s] into an unlawful fostering of religion.”

  October 20, 2012 at 2:25 pm  Tags: contraception, establishment, funding, religious liberty, sex trafficking  Posted in: Civil Rights, Constitutional Law, Feminism and Gender, First Amendment, Religion   Print This Post   8 Comments

Expanding Bob Jones University v. United States

posted by Caroline Mala Corbin

In Bob Jones University v. United States, the IRS revoked the tax exempt status of two religiously affiliated schools because they discriminated on the basis of race. One school (Goldsboro Christian Schools) refused admittance to black students, the other (Bob Jones University) barred interracial dating and marriage. Both schools claimed that the discrimination was religiously mandated, and that the loss of their tax exempt status violated the Free Exercise Clause. The schools lost. The Supreme Court characterized tax exemptions as a taxpayer subsidy for charitable organizations that, at the very least, do not contravene fundamental public policy like our commitment to racial equality, and held that racist schools did not satisfy that requirement: “[I]t cannot be said that educational institutions that, for whatever reasons, practice racial discrimination, are institutions exercising beneficial and stabilizing influences in community life or should be encouraged by having all taxpayers share in their support by way of special tax status.” In addition, the Court held that eliminating race discrimination in education was a narrowly tailored and compelling state interest. The bottom line is that a university may discriminate based on race, but it should not expect to be considered a beneficial organization entitled to tax subsidies.

Assuming Bob Jones was correctly decided, should its holding be limited to discrimination in education, or discrimination on the basis of race? I think not. In fact, the IRS denies tax exempt status to any nonprofit organization, religious or not, that invidiously discriminates on the basis of race. If you are a church that excludes blacks, or won’t let blacks become ministers, you may have the constitutional right to exist, but you won’t get any government money to help you prosper. Should the same policy apply to organizations, religious or not, that invidiously discriminate on the basis of sex?

  October 15, 2012 at 4:00 pm  Tags: Bob Jones, discrimination, free exercise, Race, sex, taxes  Posted in: Civil Rights, Constitutional Law, Education, Feminism and Gender, First Amendment, Law and Inequality, Race, Religion   Print This Post   10 Comments

The Boy Scouts and Discrimination

posted by Caroline Mala Corbin

Imagine the Boys Scouts of America discriminated on the basis of race. In this hypothetical, no black parents are allowed to lead troops, and no black children are even allowed to join them. If your child were eligible, would you let him become a Boy Scout? My guess is that the answer would be no. There are plenty of alternative extracurricular activities available, including other scouting clubs, so why belong to a racist one whose policies stigmatize innocent children and perpetuate hostility towards a group based on a completely irrelevant characteristic? In fact, you might not want to support them in any way. The federal government certainly does not: groups that discriminate on the basis of race are ineligible for government funding and cannot qualify as a tax exempt organization. In short, no government money would flow to them, not even in the form of tax breaks. As an expressive association, the Boy Scouts might have a constitutional right to discriminate, but that doesn’t mean that our tax dollars should help them.

In recognition of National Coming Out Day on October 11, let’s tweak the hypothetical and substitute sexual orientation for race. Shouldn’t the results be the same?

 

  October 9, 2012 at 12:51 pm  Tags: Boy Scouts, discrimination, National Coming Out Day, Race, sexual orientation  Posted in: Civil Rights, Constitutional Law, First Amendment, Tax   Print This Post   13 Comments

Is IP for People or Corporations?

posted by Madhavi Sunder

Another day brings another cornucopia of exciting and important comments on my book, From Goods to a Good Life: Intellectual Property and Global Justice. I thank Professors Molly Van Houweling, Jessica Silbey, Michael Madison, and Mark McKenna, and earlier Concurring Opinions commentators —Professors Deven Desai, Lea Shaver, Laura DeNardis, Zahr Said, and Brett Frischmann—for reading my book so carefully, and engaging it so helpfully. I focus here on Professor Van Houweling’s framing of an important issue arising in the discussion.

Professor Van Houweling has provoked stimulating discussion with her astute observation of two competing visions of intellectual property within the emergent “capabilities approach” school of intellectual property we identified earlier this week. Professor Van Houweling contrasts Professor Julie Cohen’s alternative justification of copyright as a tool for promoting corporate welfare (sustaining creative industries), with my attention to intellectual property laws as tools for promoting livelihood and human welfare (sustaining human beings in their quest for a good life).

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  September 14, 2012 at 1:15 am   Posted in: Civil Rights, Constitutional Law, Culture, Cyber Civil Rights, Education, Feminism and Gender, First Amendment, Jurisprudence, Law and Humanities, Law and Inequality, Media Law, Race, Symposium (From Goods to a Good Life), Technology, Uncategorized, Web 2.0   Print This Post   One Comment

BOOK REVIEW: A New (Scientific) Look at the SG and the Court (reviewing Black and Owens’s The Solicitor General and the United States Supreme Court: Executive Influence and Judicial Decisions)

posted by Ronald K.L. Collins

Ryan C. Black & Ryan J. Owens, The Solicitor General and the United States Supreme Court: Executive Influence and Judicial Decisions (Cambridge University Press, 2012)

I think a strong Solicitor General can have a very considerable influence on the Court.

– Erwin Griswold

Recently the Justices asked the Solicitor General’s office for its views on two cases, one concerning the Clean Water Act, and the other concerning the immunity of a foreign government’s central bank when the U.S. seeks to seize its assets.  Though standard fare, the request reminds us of the importance that of SG’s office in our system of justice.  To understand the workings of the Court, it is important to understand the workings of the SG’s office and how the two interact. Or as Lincoln Caplan put it in his The Tenth Justice: The Solicitor General and the Rule of Law (1987): “The relationship between the Supreme Court and the SG’s office has long been more intimate than anyone at either place likes to acknowledge.”  Indeed.  Thankfully, some of that intimacy is subject to scrutiny, as a forthcoming book on the subject reveals.

A newly released book is sure to be of interest to Court watchers. I refer to The Solicitor General and the United States Supreme Court: Executive Influence and Judicial Decisions (Cambridge University Press, 2012) by political science professors Ryan C. Black (Michigan State University) and Ryan J. Owens (University of Wisconsin, Madison).  Both have written extensively, and continue to do so, on the Court, its workings, and on constitutional law generally.  As their book and other works make clear, different SG’s approach their job quite differently and what they do can sometimes shape the resulting law announced by a majority of the Court. (See Michael McConnell, “The Rule of Law and the Solicitor General,” 21 Loy. L.A. L. Rev. 1105 (1988), and Steven Calabresi, “The President, the Supreme Court & the Constitution,” 61 L. & Contemp. Probs. 66 (1998).)

 

“Learned in the law”

The Office of the Solicitor General (OSG) is a curious institution.  On the one hand, the SG is the lawyer for the Executive Branch, yet on the other hand the SG enjoys chambers at the Supreme Court as if he or she were a “tenth justice.”  Though the SG is independent of the Court, the Justices are frequently dependent on the SG’s counsel.  Not surprisingly, then, federal law (28 U.S.C. § 505) requires that the SG, and no other, be “learned in the law.”

The SG’s influence can hardly be denied. As David O. Stewart has observed: “The Justices have relied on the SG to screen unworthy petitions for certiorari and to provide a complete statement of the relevant law.  And they have granted a disproportionately high proportion of the SG’s petitions for certiorari, invited his views on cases ion which the government was not a party and tended to rule in his favor.” (Book Review, ABAJ, Nov. 1, 1987, at 136.)  So, exactly, how influential is the OSG when it comes to what the Court does or does not do?  Professors Black and Owens answer that question by way of a remarkable illustration offered up in the first chapter of their nine-chapter book. This illustration, about which more will be said momentarily, sets the stage for a rigorous and detailed examination, replete with charts, of the work of the OSG and how it helps shape Supreme Court law.  Their work-product derives largely from, among other things, cert pool memos, private docket sheets, and other archival data collected by them and other scholars. The result is a remarkable, as their discussion of National Organization of Women v. Scheidler (1994) illustrates.

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  August 28, 2012 at 2:31 am   Posted in: Book Reviews, First Amendment, Supreme Court   Print This Post   One Comment

Cultural Dissent

posted by Frank Pasquale

I’m often reminded of Madhavi Sunder’s brilliant article Cultural Dissent. Sunder argues that recognition of dissent within doctrine “would prevent law from becoming complicit in . . . project[s] of suppressing internal cultural reform.” Consider the Russian feminist band which could be imprisoned for staging a minute-long rock video in a church. The band sang and performed an intercessory prayer for the removal of President Putin from power. Here is one member’s closing statement:

That Christ the Savior Cathedral had become a significant symbol in the political strategy of the authorities was clear to many thinking people when Vladimir Putin’s former [KGB] colleague Kirill Gundyayev took over as leader of the Russian Orthodox Church. After this happened, Christ the Savior Cathedral began to be openly used as a flashy backdrop for the politics of the security forces, which are the main source of political power in Russia.

Why did Putin feel the need to exploit the Orthodox religion and its aesthetic? Read the rest of this post »

  August 13, 2012 at 6:15 pm   Posted in: First Amendment, Religion   Print This Post   4 Comments

Is Harry Reid Engaging in Libel by Implication?

posted by Frank Pasquale

Harry Reid has sparked an uproar by suggesting that Mitt Romney paid no taxes. On the floor of the Senate, Reid stated, “The word’s out that he [Romney] hasn’t paid any taxes for 10 years.” Glenn Kessler summarizes Reid’s follow-up on the claim:

He originally told the Huffington Post that a person who had invested with Bain Capital had called his office and told him this. Then, he told reporters in Nevada that “I have had a number of people tell me that.” Reid has refused to identify his source (or sources).

Kessler notes that, “Without seeing Romney’s taxes, we cannot definitively prove Reid incorrect.” He still faults Reid for making the accusation. Others praise Reid because “his allegations are easy to disprove with evidence that Mitt Romney himself has, viz., Romney’s tax returns,” and “every party nominee for 40 years” has been more forthcoming than Romney about their taxes.

The controversy reminded me of an article on “Libel by Implication,” and a decade-old defamation case, Howard v. Antilla. That case concerned a New York Times article, which asked, “Is Robert Howard really [the felon] Howard Finkelstein? A lot of investors in Mr. Howard’s Presstek Inc., would like to know. But not even the Securities and Exchange Commission can say for sure. And the lingering mystery has roiled a hot stock and left the S.E.C. blushing.” The article reported rumors that turned out to be false, though the defendant said it was based on “1500 pages of notes and documents in her investigative file.” A jury found for Antilla on the defamation claim, but awarded Howard $480,000 on a false light claim. The First Circuit eventually vacated the verdict, engaging in some fine distinctions between claims that someone “might be” and “is” some suspect identity:
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  August 7, 2012 at 11:02 am   Posted in: First Amendment, Tax   Print This Post   4 Comments

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