Amendment Rights Research Articles

The Unrelenting Epidemic of Firearm Violence

The Supreme Court Expands Second Amendment Rights as the Nation Experiences Historic Levels of Firearms Violence

The Laws of Search, Seizure, and Custodial Interrogation: Searching the Orchard of American Constitution

The United States Criminal Justice System and court structure are two separate court systems, one at the federal level and another at the state level. In criminal proceedings, many courtrooms principally convict either by trial or by guilty plea, and many result in dismissing cases. It is necessary to examine the scope of the crime problems that criminal courts face and the organizational context as well as the policies in which they operate. The Fourth Amendment rights in particular, limits to searches and seizures are important procedures in the ongoing prosecution of crimes in America. The right of the people to remain secure in persons and properties against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated. The police have the power to search and seize, but individuals are protected against unreasonable police intrusion. The Fifth Amendment Miranda rights protect any person from custodial interrogation by the police. It is required that all arrestees be given their Miranda warnings and if they are invoked they must be scrupulously honoured.

Reaching Back: Convict Leasing and the Trusty System in the Nineteenth Century

Reaching Back: Convict Leasing and the Trusty System in the Nineteenth Century

미국 수정헌법 제2조의 무기소지권과 총기규제

On May 24, 2022, an 18-year-old young man fatally shot nineteen students and two teachers, and wounded seventeen other people, at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, in the United States. After that, according to a survey, 70% of Americans supports gun control. However, some groups of American people are against the gun control based on their constitutional right, the right to keep and bear arms in the Second Amendment of U.S. Constitution. This paper aims at exploring the interpretations on the Second Amendment based on its text and history and the concerned precedents of U.S. Supreme Court, and revealing the legal principles of the judicial review on gun control laws so far concerned with the Second Amendment right. To achieve this aim, I will examine the text and the historical background of the Second Amendment, the two opposite interpretations on the Second Amendment, major decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court on the Second Amendment right such as District of Columbia v. Heller in 2008 and McDonald v. City of Chicago in 2010 and analyze and reveal the legal principles of the judicial review on gun control laws so far concerned with the Second Amendment right.

The “Big Five” Decisions of the United States Supreme Court from June 2022: Ten Days of Consequences for the United States Supreme Court and the American People

This study on the United States Supreme Court will feature five opinions handed down by the Court relating to abortion, Second Amendment rights, two cases relating to religious liberty, and the confluence of “climate change” and administrative law that the Court decided before it adjourned for its 2022 summer recess. The paper will explain what the Supreme Court decided and then include critical passages from the holdings of the actual opinions handed down by the Court by quoting from the Supreme Court syllabus or summary, as well as pertinent portions of any majority or dissenting opinions.

The 14th Amendment in the Supreme Court's Plessy and Brown Decisions and Influences on Editorial Arguments about Segregation in the Southern United States, 1960–1964

A content analysis of the editorial pages of the Birmingham News from 1960 to 1964 shows that, despite its staunch segregationist stance, the paper's editorial pages, nonetheless, produced strong integrationist narratives. This paradox was borne of discordant interpretations of 14th Amendment rights featured in the Supreme Court's Plessy (1896) and Brown (1954) decisions. Rise of staunch segregationist groups and officials after the Court's 1954 Brown decision drove News editors to embrace greater democratic pluralism. The evolution in editorial approach corresponded to the paper's gradual adoption of Brown's interpretations of 14th Amendment rights. Change in the valence of the paper's narratives supports Condit’s (1987) thesis that rhetorical “crafting” of public morality about race brought about greater tolerance and acceptance of racial equality in America.

Miranda v. Arizona and Duties to Police for Criminal Suspects in Criminal Justice under the Constitution of United States of America

The United States Criminal Justice System and court structure are two separate court systems, one at the federal level and another at the state level. In criminal proceedings, many courtrooms principally convict either by trial or by guilty plea, and many result in dismissing cases. It is necessary to examine the scope of the crime problems that criminal courts face and the organizational context as well as the policies in which they operate. The Fourth Amendment rights in particular, limits to searches and seizures are important procedures in the ongoing prosecution of crimes in America. The right of the people to remain secure in persons and properties against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated. The police have the power to search and seize, but individuals are protected against unreasonable police intrusion. The Fifth Amendment Miranda rights protect any person from custodial interrogation by the police. It is required that all arrestees be given their Miranda warnings and if they are invoked they must be scrupulously honoured.

Teacher Speech Inside and Outside of Classrooms in the United States: Understanding the First Amendment

Concerns often arise about the First Amendment rights of public school educators in the United States both inside and outside of their classrooms. As such, after setting the legal context, we analyze teachers’ free speech rights in a variety of settings. In order to do so, we discuss illustrative cases analyzing the legal landscape of teachers’ free expressions rights in U.S. public schools. The purpose of this article is to provide a brief overview highlighting Supreme Court cases and selected opinions from lower courts involving teacher speech impact the expressive rights of educators in public schools rather than serve as a comprehensive analysis of all such speech cases.

Guidance for Professional Use of Social Media in Nutrition and Dietetics Practice

Guidance for Professional Use of Social Media in Nutrition and Dietetics Practice

Religious Exemptions

Religious Exemptions

Protect the Filter Bubbles

In 2018, Knight v. Trump sparked discussion about the boundaries between government and citizen speech on social media. Some scholars argued that the courts erred in their decision to characterize the speech in question as government speech. Others argued that the court decided correctly and claimed that the use of forum analysis was necessary to protect both the health of our democracy and the First Amendment rights of social media users. Within the context of algorithmic curation of social media feeds, this article argues that (1) social media platforms are not designated public forums due to the algorithmic curation of online user speech, (2) due to this, the public forum doctrine should not have been applied to the Knight v. Trump case, (3) despite this, user speech rights should be protected online. It also reviews proposed models of thinking that could address unresolved issues of the case.

The Nonracist and Antiracist History of Firearms Public Carry Regulation

This term, the Supreme Court will consider New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n v. Bruen, a Second Amendment challenge to New York State’s concealed carry weapon licensing system. Bruen is the first major Second Amendment case that the Court will decide on the merits in more than a decade. Briefing by the plaintiffs and gun rights scholars has in large part focused on arguments that laws regulating the carrying of guns in public, as well as gun regulation more generally, were historically intended to discriminate against minority groups. This argument is consistent with a broader effort in the conservative legal movement to tie conservative goals—using public funds to support parochial schools, prohibiting abortion, and banning affirmative action—to racial justice or minority rights. The argument essentially goes: present day gun laws are unconstitutional because gun laws of the past were intended to discriminate. But the plaintiffs and gun rights scholars cherry-pick this history of expressly racist laws primarily from the antebellum and early Reconstruction South. These states enacted broad restrictions on the rights of both enslaved persons and free people of color, including restrictions on the possession and carrying of firearms. In contrast, there is a long history of gun regulation across the country, including carry regulations, which has been applied to the general population without an intent to discriminate against minority groups. This tradition of gun regulation is the forebearer of modern gun laws, not historical laws targeted at minority groups. When assessing the historical scope of the Second Amendment, courts should look to this nonracist history, not cynical arguments about racist Southern laws. This article will first lay out the overwhelming tradition of nonracist8 gun laws, which are the predecessors to modern gun regulation. The article will then discuss how the originalist analysis should address explicitly racist historical laws and why courts should look to the nonracist history of gun regulation when assessing the scope of the Second Amendment right.

The Loss in Academic Freedom

This essay takes up the relation between free speech and academic freedom by inquiring into the problem of academic conscience. Its claim is that academic conscience originates in a certain kind of unmourned loss. To substantiate this claim, it comments on a text written by Hannah Arendt in 1958, one year after the Supreme Court for the first time recognized academic freedom as a First Amendment right. It concludes by explaining the reason why we should understand these two freedoms in terms of academic conscience: the more we comprehend the vicissitudes unique to academic conscience, the more we can comprehend how it risks closing down the same space it inaugurates and, at best, holds open.

Protesting with guns and conflating the First and Second Amendments: The case of the Bundys

ABSTRACT This article analyzes the legal discourse surrounding two armed anti-government confrontations – at Bunkerville, Nevada, in 2014, and the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon in 2016 – to understand how the public makes sense of the relationship between First and Second Amendment rights. Using the concept of non-judicial precedents and drawing on legal scholarship following District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), we find that public meaning-making mirrors concerns raised by legal scholars about using First Amendment logics to understand Second Amendment rights, conflating the two in meaning and practice. Discourse surrounding these armed confrontations focused on whether guns were needed to protect speech rights, the rhetoric of patriotism, and the contested constitutional primacy of speech versus guns. We argue that this case study demonstrates the need for communication scholars to problematize the logics that intertwine the First and Second Amendments, especially as the nation confronts the normalization of the use of guns in political protest, conflict, and insurrection.

Race and School Librarianship in the Jim Crow South, 1954–1970: The Untold Story of Carrie Coleman Robinson as a Case Study

On December 23, 1969, the National Education Association and the Alabama State Teachers Association (a black organization) filed a class action suit in federal court against the Alabama Department of Education on behalf of Carrie Coleman Robinson, Negro School Library Supervisor in Alabama’s Department of Education. The suit argued that Robinson had suffered racial discrimination in hiring and stated that her First, Fifth, Thirteenth, and Fourteenth Amendment rights had been violated. The American Association of School Librarians and its parent American Library Association (Robinson had been a member of both for decades) chose not to participate in the suit. The decision reflected the library profession’s unwillingness to openly discuss public school segregation, one of the nation’s major social issues in the last half of the twentieth century that was sparked by the Supreme Court’s landmark decision Brown v. Board of Education (1954). This article recounts the heretofore untold story of Carrie Coleman Robinson’s experiences with racial discrimination within the professions of education and librarianship.

On Data, Media, and the Deconstruction of the Administrative State

On Data, Media, and the Deconstruction of the Administrative State

Protests, the Press, and First Amendment Rights Before and after the ‘Floyd Caselaw’

As protests following the death of George Floyd engulfed the country in the summer of 2020, Americans watched in shock as members of the press were beaten, fired upon, and arrested while covering mass demonstrations. Even as charges against these reporters have largely been dropped, several members of the media have fired back, filing lawsuits asserting their civil rights. The cases that emerged from these protests — what one federal judge termed the “Floyd Caselaw” — all present “a similar tale” about the state of First Amendment rights in America and may signal a broader acceptance of judicially-recognized press rights.

Social Media Censorship of Political Speech

Censorship online presents an emerging problem in today’s politics. Social media giants, moderating content, make editorial decisions by removing content they with which they disagree. Despite many politicians’ distaste for the practice, social media companies are free to do so as private entities not beholden to the First Amendment. Current law does not offer detractors an option for recourse. 47 U.S.C. §230 of the Communications Decency Act, however, provides a grant upon which the federal government can and should place conditions. Conditions may be crafted to disincentivize censorship while not infringing on the First Amendment rights of private companies. This change is necessary due to the volume of public discourse on these private platforms.

First Amendment knowledge and competence in United States residents.

Lacking adequate knowledge about one's rights could inhibit the likelihood of exercising one's rights or lead one to unwittingly violate laws that place legitimate limits on these rights. Thus, the present research examines First Amendment knowledge as well as competence to apply this knowledge in relevant circumstances. Results revealed that one-quarter of participants failed a test of objective knowledge on First Amendment rights. Furthermore, participants' belief in their ability varied depending on their level of knowledge, in line with the Dunning-Kruger effect. Participants also failed to transfer their limited objective knowledge to "real-world" situations, exhibiting impaired First Amendment competence. These findings suggest that US residents' levels of knowledge and competence related to First Amendment rights and protections could be improved to promote a safe, knowledgeable, and democratic society.

Errors of Omission: Words Missing from the Ninth Circuit's Young v. State of Hawaii

The en banc Ninth Circuit on March 24 held that the Second Amendment right does not encompass the open handgun carriage. The decision in Young v. State of Hawaii complements the Circuit’s 2106 en banc Peruta v. San Diego, which held that concealed carry is categorically outside the Second Amendment. Thus, according to the Ninth Circuit, a state may ban both open and concealed carry. There is no right to bear handguns. According to the Ninth Circuit, carrying arms in public for defense is “not within the scope of the right protected by the Second Amendment.” This Article examines the majority opinion on its own terms. Most revealing about the majority opinion is how it selectively quotes the sources that it cites. When the Ninth Circuit’s sources are examined in detail, they support the conclusion opposite from the one reached by the court. Although carrying defensive arms may be regulated, it may not be prohibited.