First Amendment Scholarship Update - Speech

Here is this week’s list of newly available scholarship on speech topics:

1) John C. Harrison and Lillian Riemer BeVier (University of Virginia - School of Law), The State Action Principle and its Critics, forthcoming in Virginia Law Review. The abstract states:

The article is an entry in a long-standing debate concerning the soundness of the state action principle in American constitutional law. According to that principle, exercises of private rights by private people are not subject to the constitutional rules that apply to the government, even though those private decisions are supported by the government's coercive power. For many decades, some scholars have argued that the principle is irrational and also inconsistent with the purpose of some of the constitutional norms that it limits, such as the First Amendment. The article defends the principle from its critics, a group that includes a number of important contemporary constitutional theorists. We maintain that the state action principle is a reasonable implementation of the Constitution's basic distinction between public and private decision makers, and that it is consistent with a plausible and we think persuasive, understanding of the particular constitutional rules that the critics maintain the state action principle arbitrarily limits.

2) Deborah Hellman (University of Maryland - School of Law), Money Talks But it Isn't Speech, 95 Minn. L. Rev. --- ( 2011). The abstract states:

This Article challenges the central premise of our campaign finance law, namely that restrictions on giving and spending money constitute restrictions on speech and thus can only be justified by compelling governmental interests. This claim has become so embedded in constitutional doctrine that in the most recent Supreme Court case in this area, Citizens United v. FEC, the majority asserts it without discussion or argument. This claim is often defended on the grounds that money is important or necessary for speech. While money surely facilitates speech, money also facilitates the exercise of many other constitutional rights. By looking at these other rights, this Article notes that sometimes constitutional rights generate a penumbral right to spend money and sometimes they do not. Thus the fact that money facilitates the exercise of a right is insufficient to show that the right includes a penumbral right to give or spend money. The first contribution this Article makes is to identify this question: when do constitutional rights generate a penumbral right to spend money? The second contribution this Article makes is to provide an answer. When a right depends on a market good for its exercise, the right generates a penumbral right to give or spend money. When a right does not depend on a market good for its exercise, the right does not include a penumbral right to spend money. Using this account, this Article argues that the right to give and spend money in connection with elections need not be protected as speech under the First Amendment.

3) Minjeong Kim (Department of Journalism and Technical Communication, College of Liberal Arts, Colorado State University) and Lenae Vinson (Hawaii Pacific University), Friends of the First Amendment? Amicus Curiae Briefs in Free Speech/Press Cases During the Warren and Burger Courts, 1 Journal of Media Law & Ethics --- (Winter/Spring 2009). The abstract states:

This study, relying upon a pre-existing data set compiled by other researchers, quantitatively examines the trends and effect of amicus curiae brief filing in free speech/press cases decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in the years between 1953 and 1986. Out of 4,441 cases analyzed in this study, 181 cases were in the free speech/press topic area, and 124 of them had at least one amicus brief filed. The study findings demonstrate general trends in the filing and outcome of the cases; general trends of amicus curiae brief filing in free speech/press cases; the influence of amicus curiae briefs indicated in the Court opinion and indicated in litigation success; the most active participants of amicus brief filing in free speech/press cases; and the top ten free speech/press cases with the most number of amicus curiae briefs. This study suggests that various media organizations and civil rights groups would be wise to continue to engage in amicus curiae filings in free speech/press cases to defend First Amendment freedoms.

4) Jennifer S. Hendricks (University of Tennessee College of Law) and  Dawn Howerton (University of Tennessee), Teaching Values, Teaching Stereotypes: Sex Ed and Indoctrination in Public Schools , 13 University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law --- (2010). The abstract states:

Many sex education curricula currently used in public schools indoctrinate students in gender stereotypes. As expressed in the title of one article: “If You Don’t Aim to Please, Don’t Dress to Tease,” and Other Public School Sex Education Lessons Subsidized by You, the Federal Taxpayer (Jennifer L. Greenblatt, 14 TEX. J. ON C.L. & C.R. 1 (2008)). Other lessons pertain not only to responsibility for sexual activity but to lifelong approaches to family life and individual achievement. One lesson, for example, instructs students that, in marriage, men need sex from their wives and women need financial support from their husbands.

This Article first describes the ways in which teaching sex stereotypes may affect children, highlighting the need for further empirical research in this area. Second, it critiques the extant feminist legal response to gender-biased Sex Ed curricula, particularly the use of precedent dealing with governmental perpetuation of stereotypes; those precedents cannot be incorporated wholesale into this context. Finally, to correct this analytical gap, this Article connects the Sex Ed issue to the existing scholarly literature on indoctrination of schoolchildren, a literature that has hooks in both equal protection and the first amendment. The first amendment principles developed in this literature provide the missing link to explain the constitutional flaw in sex stereotyping at school. The result is an endorsement standard, based on a blending of equal protection and first amendment doctrine. Public school students should not be inculcated in values whose entrenchment by government is contrary to constitutional principles.

5) Jennifer Lynch  (Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic) and Nicole Ozer (ACLU of Northern California),, Protecting Reader Privacy in Digital Books, paper presented at Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Privacy 2010 Symposium. The abstract states:

What you choose to read says a lot about who you are, what you value, and what you believe. That’s why you should be able to learn about anything from politics to health without worrying that someone is looking over your shoulder. However, as books move into digital form, new reader privacy issues are emerging. In stark contrast to libraries that retain as little information about readers as possible, digital book services are capturing detailed information about readers: who they are, what books they browse and read, and even how long a given page is viewed, and the notes written in the “margins.” Without strong privacy protections, all of this browsing and reading history can be collected, analyzed, and may end up in the hands of the government or third parties without a reader’s knowledge or consent.

Retaining and strengthening reader privacy in the digital age requires a thorough examination of the potential privacy and free speech implications of digital book services and of the laws and policies that are needed to properly protect readers. Part I of this article discusses the history of strong legal and policy protections for reader privacy. Part II discusses current developments in digital book services. Part III discusses emerging privacy and free speech issues related to digital book services. Part IV proposes some policy and legislative solutions.

6) David A. Thomas (Brigham Young University - J. Reuben Clark Law School), Whither the Public Forum Doctrine: Has this Creature of the Courts Outlived its Usefulness?, 44 Real Property, Probate and Trust Law Journal 637 (2010). The abstract states:

Tracing both the development of the Public Forum Doctrine and the history of the property rights it affects, in this Article the Author argues that the doctrine currently exists as a tangled mass of precedent that is unworkable in practice. By juxtaposing the current application of the Public Forum Doctrine against a proposed approach that balances the property rights of the owner against the speech rights of the visitor to the land, the Author provides support for the position that the Public Forum Doctrine can be replaced by a more effective means of achieving a fair balance between the competing rights.

Includes an Appendix: Historical Details on the Emerging Concept: Governmental Immunity Over English Land in the Anglo-Saxon and Norman Periods (pp. 735-743).

7) Hyeon Tak Shin (HWANG MOK PARK PC), Legal Liabilities of Credit Rating Agencies in Structured Finance: Based upon the Business Ethics for Investor Protection , U.C. Berkeley School of Law Doctoral Dissertation, 2009. The abstract states:

This doctoral dissertation examined the legal liabilities of credit rating agencies (CRAs) in providing credit ratings of collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), which are pointed to cause the current financial crisis. Until now, CRAs abused the favorable legal and regulatory environments of credit rating business, and finally lost the ability of self-purification.

In considering tort liability of CRAs, First Amendment protection should not be allowed to CRAs, when they were hired to participate in structuring CDOs, which substantially impaired the objectivity of their rating business.

Contractual liability should be considered as well. From the particularities of the CDO transactions, an agency relationship could be inferred between issuers and investors, and then investors could be regarded as clients of CDO ratings, to whom CRAs are liable for theirs CDO ratings.

8) Ken I. Kersch (Boston College), 'Guilt by Association' and the Postwar Civil Libertarians, 25 Social Philosophy and Policy 53 (2008). The abstract states:

In recent years, the constitutional freedom of association has assumed a relatively low profile. Today, the most extended discussions of the right consider it as a second-order countervailing claim in civil rights cases involving questions of identity and the right to exclude. This article provides a brief overview of the right at a time when it was one of the most widely discussed, first-order constitutional rights, and when those discussions centered not on the right to exclude but on the question of “guilt by association.” The article provides a sampling of the way that right was considered in the immediate post-World War Two years in the writings of some of the era's most prominent civil libertarian thinkers – Leo Pfeffer, Milton Konvitz, Robert Cushman, Henry Steele Commager, Zechariah Chafee, Jr., and Sidney Hook. These writings demonstrate that doctrinal development concerning the right was driven by its implication in two of the major political issues of the day: domestic security at the height of the Cold War and civil rights. The article concludes by arguing that, in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks and the ongoing fight against terrorism, free association questions are likely to assume renewed prominence. It argues further that, in a contemporary context, those thinking about the most pressing freedom of association questions would profit by looking less to the more recent discussions of the right as a matter of the right to exclude, and more to the highly-relevant discussions of “guilt by association” by the currently less well known mid-century civil libertarians.

JFB