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The article explores the impact of the 2021 U.S. Supreme Court case Mahanoy Area School District v. B.L. on student participation in extra-curricular activities and off-campus student speech. Topics discussed include brief details of the case which concerns the First Amendment rights of students off-campus, the way the case challenged previous student speech-related cases such as the 1969 Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, and the response of educators to the case.

The article discusses the distinction between subject matter and viewpoint in free speech cases in the U.S. to enable a more realistic and value-sensitive strategy to free speech interests. Other topics include the legal and practical differences between government regulation of speech and the established constitutional law on free speech.

Humor is a form of speech capable of boosting the political value of a speech’s content or even reversing its meaning. Courts acknowledge these qualities by considering that an expression may enjoy an elevated level of free speech protection against government sanctions or private suits if it is formulated in a humorous way. This article spotlights another key attribute of humor, that is perhaps more consequential for the socio-political impact of an expression but that nonetheless does not seem to be invoked in free speech litigation: its power to increase the exposure of the speech. A humorous presentation of an idea offers its audience an entertaining form that is desirable to consume independently of the message it conveys. It lowers the costs of processing irrelevant or objectionable content and so bears the potential of catching the attention of those who would not otherwise be exposed to it. I argue that the capacity of humor to “raise the volume” of speech must be accounted for in the balancing formulas of constitutional and international free speech litigation. To underline the importance of this factor, I focus on cases of hate speech, a category where humor plays a decisive role in the outreach to audiences that do not always share the prejudice or intolerance of the speaker. This article analyzes the case law of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) and of French courts as an example of the general disregard of courts for humor’s amplification of hate speech. The far-reaching damage potential of this disregard is demonstrated on the case of Dieudonné, a notorious French antisemitic comic who has masterfully exploited humor to expose large audiences to hateful content. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyzes in the decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit in Meriwether v. Hartop that Shawnee State University violated Professor Nicholas Meriwether's First Amendment right to free speech. Topics discussed are free speech in the context of public academia's pedagogy, balance between free exercise clause and protection of people, due process vagueness in discrimination policy, and religious reasons exception within protective policy.

The article explores the freedom of speech rights of abortion providers in the U.S. Topics discussed include the status of laws compelling speech from abortion providers, the constitutional background involved in such laws, the First Amendment jurisprudence regarding compelled speech, and the Court's decision in the case, National Institute of Family and Life Advocates v. Becerra.

The U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Garcetti v. Ceballos put further restraints on public employee speech by exempting from First Amendment protection speech made pursuant to the "official duties" of public employees. This limitation, if applied to the speech of college professors, would constrain their academic freedom of instruction and scholarship by permitting overbearing institutional oversight. This constraint would be detrimental not only to the employed professors, but also to their students and the post-secondary educational system as a whole. Courts should not apply Garcetti to academic freedom in the post-secondary education context, and they should avoid further limitations on professorial speech. This Note argues that Garcetti should not be applied to higher education faculty by reconsidering the purpose of the university and the role that students and colleagues play in the expressive activities of professors. While many commentators have noted Garcetti's potential detriment to the speaker, very few have considered the audience's participation in both instruction and research. This Note accounts for the rights of those receiving instruction from, or engaging in scholarship with, the professor to argue that restraints on professorial speech harm both the speaker and the audience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the U.S. Supreme Court decided its first free speech case 100 years ago, two very different eras have defined First Amendment law. For a half century, before 1970, the Supreme Court focused on protecting the expressive freedom of political dissidents and social reformers. In 1970, amid protests against the Vietnam War, the Ohio National Guard senselessly gunned down four students at Kent State University. The Kent State massacre exposed the fragility in our country of political protest, free speech, and democracy itself. That atrocity should have inspired First Amendment law to affirm and enhance its protection of dissenters and vulnerable speakers. Instead, in a tragic irony, 1970 marks the moment when the Supreme Court began to unmoor First Amendment law from its formative principles and to prioritize protection of wealthy, powerful speakers. Professor Magarian contends that the Court's shift since 1970 has betrayed the First Amendment's democratic promise and transformative power. He calls for the next century to restore and advance First Amendment law's foundational ideals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This Article argues that the United States Supreme Court should significantly alter its current categorical approach for discerning standards of judicial review in free-speech cases. The present system should become nondeterminative and be augmented with a modified version of Justice Stephen Breyer's long-preferred proportionality framework. Specifically, the Article's proposed tack fuses facets of today's policy, which largely pivots on distinguishing content-based laws from content-neutral laws and letting that categorization determine scrutiny, with a more nuanced, values-and-interests methodology. A values-and-interests formula would allow the Court to climb up or down the traditional ladder of scrutiny rungs - strict, intermediate or rational basis - depending on whether a statute jeopardizes a core rationale for safeguarding free expression and the degree to which that rationale is threatened. Given the frequent divide along partisan lines on today's Supreme Court over scrutiny in First Amendment speech cases, a two-tiered approach that blends aspects of a categorical strategy with a values-and-interests tack provides a path forward as the Court moves fully into the third decade of the twenty-first century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports that the U.S. Supreme Court articulated a rule for school regulation of on-campus speech in a line of cases beginning with Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District and ending with Morse v. Frederick. It mentions circuit split over the issue of school regulation of student internet speech. It also mentions territorial nexus for the scope of the school's power and prohibiting schools from punishing internet speech.

The article discusses the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Garcetti v. Ceballos involving First Amendment free speech protections for public employees. It details how the Court created a categorical rule that government employees have no free speech rights when engaged in official, job-related speech. It also addresses several lower court decisions that illustrate how Garcetti has led to unfair results and diminished the free speech rights of public employees.

The article focuses on the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in the case Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission which had its first chance to resolve the religious exemption question vis-à-vis sexual orientation discrimination. It mentions First Amendment rights to free exercise of religion and speech exempted him from the Colorado Antidiscrimination Act (CADA). It also mentions race analogy question for every LGBT-rights claim.

The United States Supreme Court's 2010 opinion in the crush-video case of United States v. Stevens made it extremely difficult to declare new varieties of low-value speech unprotected by the First Amendment. Five years later, the Court's sign-ordinance ruling in Reed v. Town of Gilbert made it exceedingly tough for facially content-based regulations imposed on presumptively protected speech to be analyzed by any standard of judicial review less rigorous than the demanding strict scrutiny test. This Article examines how some courts today, despite being hemmed in by the strictures of both Stevens and Reed, are creatively unearthing novel ways to apply more lenient levels of review to content-based laws targeting varieties of speech--in particular, revenge pornography and conversion therapy--that seemingly carry trifling value for furthering traditional First Amendment ideals. Those time-honored goals addressed in this Article include promoting democratic self-governance and facilitating truth discovery in the metaphorical marketplace of ideas. The Article asserts that rather than resorting to artful efforts to dodge both Reed and a rigid categorical approach to First Amendment analysis, lower courts should boldly embrace Justice Breyer's values-and-interests methodology for proportionate scrutiny in these cases. This, in turn, would tee up for possible Supreme Court reconsideration Reed and, conceivably, even Stevens. Significantly, as the Article explains, Justice Breyer advocated in 2019 for this approach in the lowvalue speech case of Iancu v. Brunetti involving the trademark "FUCT." This bolsters the argument for its applicability when it comes to analyzing laws barring the low-value expression of revenge pornography and conversion therapy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in the case Tinker v. Des Moines Independent School District regarding on-campus student speech. It mentions school administrators unlimited discretion to punish students for off-campus speech, and provides little protection for online speech. It also mentions courts are struggling with how to maintain necessary balance between a student's free speech rights and a school's authority to protect the school environment from disruption.

In the fall of 2018, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) issued a decision upholding the criminal conviction of an Austrian national (E.S.) in violation of Austria's Criminal Code against the disparagement of religious doctrines. Her initial conviction in the Austrian court was based on statements she made about the Prophet Muhammad while teaching a series of seminars entitled "Basic Information on Islam." In upholding her conviction, the ECtHR found that there had been no violation of the Austrian's right to freedom of expression under Article 10 of the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights (Convention), and therefore Austria's conviction was valid and did not impermissibly infringe on her right to freedom of expression. This case adds yet another dimension to the polarizing debate regarding freedom of expression and the permissible limitations that may be placed upon this freedom. In this article, I argue that this case can be viewed as a turning point in the free expression debate, and perhaps indicates an awareness that such restrictions on speech may be necessary in order to maintain public safety and order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyzes the position of the U.S. Supreme Court in the issue of using the free speech right to challenge the bans on gay conversion therapy in the country. It discusses how gays describe the therapy as a torture as it associates same-sex contact with pain. The author examines different cases that upheld the ban on the actual performance of the therapy but failed to prevent practitioners from advocating it to their patients.

Viewed closely and comprehensively, Masterpiece Cakeshop, far from simply being the narrow, shallow, and modest decision many have taken it to be, is a rich, multi-faceted decision that cleaves and binds the parties to the case, carefully managing conflictual crisis. Through a ruling for a faithful custom-wedding-cake baker against a state whose legal processes are held to have been marred by antireligious bias, the Court unfolds a cross-cutting array of constitutional wins and losses for cultural conservatives and traditional moralists, on the one hand, and for lesbians and gay men and their supporters committed to civil and equal rights, on the other. The Court's central anti-religious-discrimination holding doesn't only potentially benefit opponents of such discrimination in other cases. This holding also has boomerang-like tendencies that should make it useful for those who would level antidiscrimination claims on a variety of other grounds. Liberal and progressive audiences might thus reconsider their aversions to the decision for this reason alone. What's more, Masterpiece Cakeshop's "shadow rulings," described in detail here, dole out notable victories to cultural conservatives, traditional moralists, and lesbians and gay men alike. Officially declining to adjudicate the merits of the baker's artistic freedom claim under the First Amendment, the Court's opinion expresses openness and sympathy, but ultimately substantive doubt about it. In these respects, and notwithstanding suggestions to the contrary, Masterpiece Cakeshop is full of substantive lawmaking. Having tracked that lawmaking to its textual limits, analysis turns to the opinion's final passage, which, on one level, importantly recapitulates the opinion's constitutional rulemaking, instructing courts and governmental actors one last time on how to handle cases like this one in the future. On another level, the passage is a compass pointing to lessons in moral politics that the opinion offers to the partisans of the Kulturkampf. One version of the Court's moral-political teaching involves instruction in a moral politics of respect and friendship. This may be practically politically viable, leaving aside whether it will in fact be accepted. A more ambitious version of the opinion's moral-political teaching involves a moral politics of sibling love that's certain to be widely and emphatically rejected. Reconfigured in aesthetic terms, however, the moral politics of sibling love may receive a more nuanced hearing: widely dismissed as an undertaking appropriate for politics, but received with perhaps different sensibilities on an aesthetic plane. If it's presently uncertain and undecidable whether Masterpiece Cakeshop will prove to have been a major legal event, whatever is ultimately made of it, it covers plenty of ground, doing plenty of legal and extra-legal work, in the here and now. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on several U.S. Court cases related to higher education. Topics discussed include Berndsen v. N.D. Univ. Sys. in which student athletes sued University alleging violation of Title IX, Haughwout v. Tordenti in which student sued University alleging violation of First Amendment right to Free Speech and Clark v. Navient Solutions, LLC in which debtor sued debt collector alleging excessive automated calls violated state and federal laws.

The article focuses on decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in the case West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette and National Institute of Family & Life Advocates v. Becerra (NIFLA) on First Amendment jurisprudence. It mentions the cases represents an exclamation point on his wonderful legacy of protecting freedom of thought and freedom of speech. It also mentions importance of the First Amendment for the protection of intellectual autonomy.

The article focuses on the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in the case West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette which holds that Constitution prohibits public school officials from compelling Jehovah's Witness schoolchildren to salute and pledge allegiance to the American flag. It mentions Government has constitutional power to regulate religious actors only where their conduct imposes upon the freedom and peace of others.

The article focuses on temporal dimensions of bigotry and how the invocation of bigotry has manifested in law and U.S. Supreme Court case in the case Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission. It mentions how the government must treat the religious beliefs of those opposed to LGBT equality from the question of whether the government can enforce LGBT antidiscrimination law against religious objectors. It also mentions bigotry to insulate current practices of inequality.

The article focuses on the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in the case Brandenburg v. Ohio on turmoil of political protest as incitement exception. It mentions regulation of speech to avoid the persuasive effect of its message on listeners presumptively violates the Constitution. It also mentions government agencies of private speech on nonpublic forum property and balance of government authority and speaker rights and impacts on nonpublic forum property.

The article focuses on the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in the case Brandenburg v. Ohio on incitement standard has become a pillar of free speech law. It mentions jihadist terrorism assumed by the scholars proposing to alter or work around Brandenburg. It also examines the impact of weakening Brandenburgs strict requirements and concludes that any attempt to regulate terrorist advocacy is likely to be used in an arbitrary manner.

The article focuses on the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in the case Brandenburg v. Ohio which remains a cornerstone of modern First Amendment jurisprudence. It mentions Brandenburg encapsulates the exceptional nature of American free speech culture and high tolerance for potential social harms caused by speech. It also mentions confronted a parallel issue in Carpenter v. United States, a landmark Fourth Amendment decision of U.S. Supreme Court.

The article focuses on the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in the case Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission on Colorado's Anti-Discrimination Act (CADA) makes it a discriminatory practice. It mentions probable cause that Phillips had violated CADA and referred the case to the Civil Rights Commission and commission initiated a formal hearing before an administrative law judge. It also mentions staff training on the Public Accommodations section of CADA.

The author discusses clarification on viewpoint discrimination in First Amendment free speech doctrine. Topics covered include an overview of free speech doctrine in terms of the various standards of scrutiny when viewpoint discrimination either is or is not occurring, how to make the overall doctrine more predictable in various areas of free speech doctrine, and the distinction between content-based and content-neutral regulations of speech shown in the 1968 case of U.S. v. O'Brien.

The article argues that the Supreme Court's decision in case "Garcetti v. Ceballos" substantially changed the judicial inquiry into public-employee speech by creating a new threshold question. Topics discussed include criticism of Garcetti and the confusion it has produced among the circuit courts; theoretical explanations of the differences between questions of law' and additional procedural issues raised by the mixed-question classification.

In 2011, the Occupy movement began. Occupiers seized space in dozens of public parks and in the American imagination, providing a compelling illustration of an inclusive format of political expression. In the courtroom, protesters sought injunctive relief on First Amendment grounds to protect the tent encampments where Occupiers slept. In 2017, the last of the Occupy litigation ended; but the ramifications the Occupy cases hold for the First Amendment and expressive conduct remain unexamined. This Comment takes an in-depth look at the adjudication of Occupiers' First Amendment interest in sleeping in public parks. It analyzes the adjudication of the Occupy cases and contends that the pattern of judicial enforcement results from a desire to remove the appearance of disorder associated with houselessness. This Comment argues that the test used to set the scrutiny level for First Amendment expressive activity systematically disadvantages speech by and about houseless persons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This Article examines flaws with the U.S. Supreme Court's 2017 decision in Matal v. Tam that equated giving offense with viewpoint discrimination. Already, the Court's language in Tam that "giving offense is a viewpoint" is being cited by multiple lower courts. This Article argues, however, that giving offense is not synonymous with viewpoint discrimination. This Article contends that the Court in Tam conflated two distinct strands of First Amendment jurisprudence--namely, its offensive-speech cases with principles against viewpoint discrimination. The Article proposes two possible paths forward to help courts better clarify when a case such as Tam should be analyzed as an offensive-speech case and when it should be treated as a case involving viewpoint-based discrimination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the case of Robins v. Pruneyard involving the right of free speech in privately owned premises. Topics discussed include the Supreme Court of California's 1979 ruling that soliciting by high school students at the Pruneyard Shopping Center for signatures for a petition is protected by the free speech guarantee of the California Constitution and the exclusion of the liberty of speech clause of the California Constitution from the purview of the judgment.

This article provides an analysis of the potential ramifications of the 2017 U.S. Supreme Court case, Matal v. Tam, which has forged a hybrid trademark and free speech right. In permitting trademarks to be allowed over the Disparagement Clause, First Amendment rights are now inextricably intertwined with the scope of trademark protection. This paper examines the holding of the Matal v. Tam case and predicts how the case will influence the behavior of trademark filings and the development of trademark law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prosecutors, as representatives of the public in the criminal justice system, are the sole advocates for "the People" in a criminal case. Thus, prosecutors are expected to maintain a particular level of integrity that would ensure a fair and just representation of the People. Despite this expectation, the wide discretionary authority prosecutors hold makes it virtually impossible to regulate their conduct. Furthermore, the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution protects many expressions of viewpoints, and such protections extend--albeit to a limited degree--to prosecutors, thereby giving them even more discretion in how they decide to handle their own cases. Nonetheless, the U.S. Supreme Court has not interpreted the First Amendment to protect prosecutors whose words evidently contravene the functions of the prosecutor's office. Rather, a prosecutor may be terminated if the office finds that the prosecutor's speech undermines the office's interests. What the law does not address, however, is the extent to which the First Amendment protects prosecutors whose unfavorable viewpoints do not affect their individual performance within the workplace but nonetheless detract from the community's trust in the prosecutor's office. This Note examines the state of the First Amendment as it applies to prosecutors within the scope of their employment and utilizes the underlying principles to expand the discussion to prosecutorial speech beyond the scope of their employment. Ultimately, this Note proposes that prosecutorial speech should be regulated not only by the effect the speech has on the office's functions but also by the adverse effect the speech has on the community's trust in the prosecutor and the office to pursue justice in an unbiased manner. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]