Search

Heated battles over free speech have erupted on college campuses across the United States in recent months. Some of the most prominent incidents involve efforts by students to prevent public appear...

The September 26, 1960 presidential debate between Vice President Richard M. Nixon and Senator John F. Kennedy is widely regarded as one of the great moments in U.S. politics. As such, it is not surprising that this spectacle is prominently featured in exhibits at both presidential museums. By deftly manipulating physical space, text and artifacts, and televisual elements, the exhibits develop competing narratives about the meaning of this historic event. The close reading of the exhibits contained in this article offers new insights into political debates, the nature of collective memory, and the complicated relationship between substance and appearance in political discourse.

The Supreme Court’s landmark decision in New York Times v. Sullivan is notable because it imposed an “actual malice” test that makes it difficult for public figures to recover damages for defamation claims. The intent of this essay is not to minimize the significance of Sullivan , but rather to suggest that most accounts of the case miss one crucial aspect of the Court’s decision. To obtain the desired result—to overturn the jury verdict in Sullivan’s favor—Justice Brennan’s majority opinion created both a substantive standard and a series of procedural safeguards. The actual malice test has been praised as a bulwark of First Amendment freedoms, but absent the accompanying protections laid out by Justice Brennan, it would be a hollow promise as it is the procedural safeguards that guarantees “debate on public issues is uninhibited, robust and wide open.”

(2012). The Cheerleader and the Athlete: A Sad Tale About the Dismal State of Student Speech Rights. Free Speech Yearbook: Vol. 46, No. 1, pp. 73-84.

(2012). Index to the Free Speech Yearbook Volumes 1 (1962) to 45 (2011) Free Speech Yearbook: Vol. 46, No. 1, pp. 131-160.

In “The People v. Larry Flynt,” Milos Forman offers a sympathetic rendition of the many legal woes of Larry Flynt. While this movie was a financial disappointment, it remains worthy of scholarly attention as it contributes to an informed understanding of the complex relationship between popular culture and the freedom of expression.

The growth of the Internet has created a host of thorny legal issues that range from defamatory postings on computer bulletin boards to “spamming”; (unwanted email) and invasion of privacy rights. This study reviewed 400 student‐authored World Wide Web pages to assess the use of intellectual property. A review of these pages found that 43.8 percent appropriated images that would likely qualify as protected intellectual property, and that the students who used images averaged three such uses per page. The final section briefly discusses three of the more troublesome implications of these findings.

Critical Legal Studies poses a direct and expressed challenge to the basic tenets of American legal education and scholarship. Critical Legal Studies postulates that law is not a scientific exercise involving the application of objective principles, but rather a creative process involving the selection of conflicting rules which has the effect of reinforcing the existing political order. In an effort to explain the contribution of Critical Legal Studies to argumentation theory, this essay briefly discusses the role of legal reasoning in the American legal system, describes and critiques Legal Positivism, lays the intellectual foundation for Critical Legal Studies, and considers the implications that this conception of jurisprudence has for argumentation theory.

The growing popularity of counterplans has generated a controversy over the proper locus of competition. Theorists have argued that the counterplan must compete with the plan, the policy system, th...

This essay addresses the nature of topicality, first, examining the function of the debate resolution as a topic area that divides the argumentative ground for debate and, second, considering the m...