Addressing Hate Speech and Hate Behaviors in Codes of Conduct: A Model for Public Institutions

This article suggests that the Australian High Court might usefully utilize more of the First Amendment jurisprudence than it has done so to date. After a succinct summary of the Australian implied freedom and First Amendment case law, it documents cases in which the Australian High Court has either utilised, or not utilised, First Amendment case law. It suggests specific instances in which the Australian case law might utilize some of the American doctrine, and responds to suggestions that the American case law is not applicable to the Australian constitutional context.

This article examines the history of public and private executions and the passage of private execution laws. It concludes that existing laws restricting media access to executions – and requiring private executions that exclude television cameras – are unconstitutional. The author examines existing statutory schemes which curtail media access and prohibit the filming of executions, discusses legal challenges to such laws, and explores freedom of the press jurisprudence. In particular, the article analyzes First Amendment case law and right-of-access cases. The author also discusses the Eighth Amendment's relationship to First Amendment case law in the area of media coverage of executions.

Digital Disinformation During Declared Disasters: a First Amendment Storm Warning

As part of a larger study, the researchers collected campus codes prohibiting hate crimes, which were then reviewed by one of the authors, an attorney with extensive experience in First Amendment case law, to determine whether the codes presented constitutional problems. Based on this review, the authors developed a model policy that is content neutral and does not use language that could be viewed as unconstitutionally vague or broad. This model can provide institutions with guidelines for drafting constitutionally sound codes.

There is a familiar saying, “If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” The so-called Law of the Hammer takes a distinctive form in adjudication. If all judges see is one repeating fact pattern for a given area of law, they might perceive it as archetypical and build the law around it. If that fact pattern does not accurately reflect the field, however, the result can be analytical distortion in terms of both the choice of doctrine and its implementation. This Article uses Second Amendment jurisprudence to illustrate this phenomenon. It reveals how District of Columbia v. Heller constitutionalized a policy area far broader than most appreciate, one that involves not only guns but various other weapons. The Article then shows how litigation fails to reflect that breadth. Guns are just one category of “arms” that most Americans choose not to own or carry for self-defense, but guns alone saturate Second Amendment case law. Non-gun arms are out of view when judges establish and apply Second Amendment doctrine. The Article contends that this gun-centricity, by obscuring the ways Americans exercise post-Heller Second Amendment rights, has led judges to exaggerate burdens, misread history, and espouse short-sighted doctrine to implement the right to keep and bear arms. More generally, the Second Amendment case study in this Article exposes litigation circumstances that create a heightened risk of such distortion and proposes possible solutions.

A First Amendment Profile of the Supreme Court focuses on the nine justices of the United States Supreme Court and determines their frames for assessing First Amendment cases. In each of the chapters, a justice will be profiled in terms of his or her claims during the nomination hearings and the positions they have taken in significant Supreme Court decisions. The object of these chapters is to provide a rhetorical frame that each of these justices would find appealing regarding First Amendment case law.

A First Amendment Profile of the Supreme Court focuses on the nine justices of the United States Supreme Court and determines their frames for assessing First Amendment cases. In each of the chapters, a justice is profiled in terms of his or her claims during the nomination hearings and the positions they have taken in significant Supreme Court decisions. These chapters provide a rhetorical frame that each of these justices would find appealing regarding First Amendment case law.

On First Amendment issues, today’s Supreme Court is arguably the most protective in the institution’s history. But the apparent libertarian consensus masks a surprisingly deep disagreement about the manner in which First Amendment decisions should be made. The Court’s Republican justices prefer an austere, formal approach in which logical conclusions are pursued to the farthest reach. The Court’s Democratic justices, on the other hand, would follow a more complex, contextual approach in which rules and standards are often custom-tailored to narrow factual domains. This Article models that divide. I demonstrate that the Court’s First Amendment case law over the past three decades has conformed to a small set of unspoken rules that I call “the four tenets.” These four tenets have defined First Amendment doctrine for nearly thirty years, and they are today so deeply ingrained that we barely notice them. Yet they do not represent a consensus position. Instead, the Court’s four Democratic justices stand prepared to break with the four tenets, and President Trump’s nominee could well supply the fifth vote. If that occurs, it will mean the end of an era in First Amendment law and the beginning of a new one.

This Article draws on empirical analysis, history, and economic theory to show that corporations have begun to displace individuals as direct beneficiaries of the First Amendment and to outline an argument that the shift reflects economically harmful rent seeking. The history of corporations, regulation of commercial speech, and First Amendment case law is retold, with an emphasis on the role of constitutional entrepreneur Justice Lewis Powell, who prompted the Supreme Court to invent corporate and commercial speech rights. The chronology shows that First Amendment doctrine long post-dated both pervasive regulation of commercial speech and the rise of the U.S. as the world’s leading economic power – a chronology with implications for originalists, and for policy. Supreme Court and Courts of Appeals decisions are analyzed to quantify the degree to which corporations have displaced individuals as direct beneficiaries of First Amendment rights, and to show that they have done so recently, but with growing speed since Virginia Pharmacy, Bellotti, and Central Hudson. Nearly half of First Amendment challenges now benefit business corporations and trade groups, rather than other kinds of organizations or individuals, and the trend-line is up. Such cases commonly constitute a form of corruption: the use of litigation by managers to entrench reregulation in their personal interests at the expense of shareholders, consumers, and employees. In aggregate, they degrade the rule of law, rendering it less predictable, general and clear. This corruption risks significant economic harms in addition to the loss of a republican form of government.

This chapter focuses on recent First Amendment case law and proposed legislation that have shaped and will continue to influence judicial affairs.

In this Essay we investigate whether new modes of online communication ought to be covered by free speech principles. The types of communications we’re interested in are the outputs of programs that synthesize, organize, and transmit third-party communications to users. Search engine results are the most familiar and ubiquitous example of this. Another notable example is Trending News on Facebook. While we are interested in the immediate policy implications of this classificatory question, this Essay also puts forth a broader methodological critique. More specifically, we critique the analogical reasoning – which likens search engine results to editorial publications – that has dominated First Amendment case law and legal scholarship around this issue to date. We argue that this analogy is unpersuasive on its own terms, and that proponents of this analogy have failed to properly engage with rival analogical interpretations of the function of search engines that favor the opposite conclusion (i.e., that search engine results should not receive free speech coverage). We argue that this is indicative of shortcomings with analogical methods in debates over free speech coverage more generally. When important and novel forms of communicative practice are being considered, courts should not use tenuous analogical inferences to extend First Amendment protections beyond their established scope. Here we present, for the first time in this literature, a taxonomy of different types of analogical reasoning, in order to offer a more precise account of the specific forms of analogical reasoning that we’re objecting to. We then explain the comparative merits of addressing question of coverage in a way that primarily relies on reference to three normative theories of free speech: democratic participation, epistemic, and thinker-based. We argue that under each of these theories – contrary to the currently prevailing view in both the cases and existing scholarship – only a subset of search engine results and similar communication should in fact be afforded free speech coverage.

This paper examines the post-Heller Second Amendment case law in the lower courts and concludes that although federal courts are not rushing to overturn gun laws under the Second Amendment, they are moving more rapidly to implement Heller than under previous 'revolutionary' decisions such as U.S. v. Lopez. There is also some evidence that state courts are taking the right to arms more seriously, with the additional possibility that the new federal right to arms may boost interest in the numerous state right-to-arms provisions. Finally, by characterizing gun ownership as a protected individual right, Heller has served to 'renormalize' firearms ownership, a change in legal philosophy that may be as significant as any doctrinal shifts.

First Amendment scholars and advocates have often criticized the American public's inconsistent dedication to free expression. Many studies have attempted to identify variables that predict pro-censorship attitudes, but such relationships remain largely enigmatic. The confusion is due, in part, to the myriad ways in which censorship attitudes have been conceptually and operationally defined. Informed by First Amendment theory and case law, a conceptual and operational approach to measuring these attitudes is proposed and tested. The results show it is important to conceptualize censorship attitudes as multifaceted.

This article describes how the Supreme Court, in a series of land-use cases, is resurrecting economic substantive due process, which has been presumed dead since its rejection in the 1930s for blocking legislation aimed at fighting the Great Depression. The most dramatic step in this reversion to Lochner is Koontz v. St. Johns River Water Management District, a case handed down on June 25, 2013. Koontz extended the reach of Nollan v. California Coastal Commission and Dolan v. City of Tigard, cases that expanded takings law to include the lack of sufficient connection between a property interest required for mitigation of a permitted project and the project’s adverse impacts. Those cases changed the judicial standard for reviewing permit conditions requiring the dedication of land from rational basis to the heightened takings standard, which includes the government bearing the burden of persuasion. In Koontz, the Court ruled that this takings concept was applicable to the requirement that the permit applicant expend money to compensate for the impacts of the permitted activity despite the fact that the Fifth Amendment and previous case law confine takings analysis to property interests. The practical effect of Koontz is that courts must implement substantive due process review to a vast amount of permit decisions of local, state, and federal government. This article examines the doctrines of takings, substantive due process, and unconstitutional condition to arrive at the conclusion that the takings test created by Nollan, Dolan, and Koontz revives economic substantive due process. The article recognizes the legitimacy of the desire of property rights advocates for more than rubber stamp, rational basis review of progressively more stringent land-use regulation. To that end, the article concludes by proposing alternatives that accomplish this without resurrecting economic substantive due process that is a bad doctrine now for the same reasons it was rejected in the 1930s.

Hate crime and hate speech are extreme examples of negative intergroup relations. It is thought that it would be very useful to analyze the variables that lead up to for dealing with hate speech and crimes that have many physical and psychological destructive consequences for the exposed group members. Therefore, the aim of the present study is to address some of the social psychological variables associated with hate speech and hate crimes and to suggest solutions to reduce hate speech and hate crimes in this context. For this purpose, first of all, hate speech and hate crimes were defined and various examples were presented in this direction. Later, hate crimes and hate speech were examined in terms of social identity identification, social dominance orientation, system justification, realistic and symbolic threat perception, frustration and scapegoat concepts. The relationship between hate speech and crimes of this concept has been embodied with research findings and examples from various regions in Turkey and the world. Finally, some solution suggestions have been presented by making use of this theoretical knowledge in terms of combating hate crimes and hate speeches. Keywords: Hate crime, hate speech, intergroup relations, social psychology