Judge Kozinski Addresses Pepperdine Symposium on the Increasing Obsolescence of Current First Amendment Doctrine

On Opinio Juris Roger Alford provides a brief summary of Judge Kozinski's remarks at Pepperdine School of Law's recent symposium, "Free Speech & Press in the Modern Age -Can 20th Century Theory Bear the Weight of 21st Century Demands?".  Alford writes:

Ninth Circuit Chief Judge Alex Kozinski declared in a speech today that the First Amendment is dead. In a keynote speech entitled “The Late, Great First Amendment” given at a Pepperdine Law Review symposium, Kozinski offered a detailed analysis of the consequences of the Internet age for First Amendment jurisprudence. I’m sure that Eugene Volokh, Jack Balkin and other bloggers at the First Amendment conference will have their own take on his speech. But from my perspective, the essence of his speech was that, in a day when Internet speech is not capable of suppression, the ability of the First Amendment to have a moderating effect is now gone. What use does a constitutional limitation have on government restrictions on speech when the government no longer has the ability to control speech?

Kozinski argued that today we live in an age when whistleblowers are unknowable, documents are leaked without consequence, blogger journalists are anonymous and judgment proof, and the mainstream media is in financial peril. Any attempts to restrict speech results in that speech replicated a thousand times over. As such, the First Amendment jurisprudence that we cherish so dearly is now obsolete.

Alford then proceeds through Judge Kozinski's treatment of a variety of specific precedents that he perceives to have limited utility in the Internet age.  The full text of Judge Kozinski's speech will be included in an upcoming Pepperdine Law Review symposium edition.

JFB