Book bans and censorship battles have garnered considerable attention in recent years, but one of the most critical battlegrounds is kept out of the public eye. Prison officials can ban any book that threatens the security or operations of their facility. This means that the knowledge access rights of incarcerated people are subject to the judgments of the people detaining them. This Note focuses on books about Black people in America and books...
First Amendment
Recent explosive growth in environmental and climate-related marketing claims by business firms has raised concerns about the truthfulness of these claims. Critics argue (or at least question whether) such claims constitute greenwashing, which refers to a set of deceptive marketing practices in which an entity publicly misrepresents or exaggerates the positive environmental impact of a product, a service, or the entity itself. The extent to which...
During and after last year’s expansive Black Lives Matter protests, police departments nationwide publicly shared robust video surveillance of protestors. Much of this footage rendered individual protestors identifiable, sometimes in ways that seemed intentional. Such disclosures raise First Amendment concerns under NAACP v. Alabama ex rel. Patterson and its progeny, including the recent Americans for Prosperity v. Bonta decision....
In response to Black Lives Matter protests across the country in the summer of 2020, then-President Donald Trump sent federal agents into numerous American cities to “dominate” the protesters. These agents were largely unidentified, lacking both departmental insignia and badges displaying their personal identification information. As we have seen in the past, when law enforcement officers do not identify themselves, they can evade accountability...
Dating back to the Founding, theorists have touted the checking value of the press in exposing government corruption and abuse. Pretextual arrests targeting professional and citizen journalists raise significant First Amendment concerns. Even a brief, “catch-and-release” detainment may altogether prevent a newsgatherer from capturing images or disseminating timely news updates from an event. In this sense, arrests of newsgatherers pose similar...
Data scraping—the automated collection of data on the internet—is used in a variety of contexts. On the commercial side, scraping might be used as a means of competition—such as scraping by one company to retrieve information on prices for services provided by a competitor. On the noncommercial side, scraping could be used as a research tool—such as scraping by a news outlet to investigate Amazon’s...
In 2018, the Supreme Court held in National Institute of Family & Life Advocates v. Becerra (NIFLA) that requiring a crisis pregnancy center to place a sign in its waiting room alerting people to available abortion services elsewhere violated the First Amendment. Abortion providers are often faced with similar requirements—but the Court’s cursory treatment of the First Amendment in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey...
Introduction Professor Kang raises two fundamental worries about the associational path to party reform in The Problem of Irresponsible Party Government, his response to my essay, Networking the Party: First Amendment Rights and the Pursuit of Responsive Party Government. First, he doubts the feasibility of reestablishing thick relational parties given social, technological, and cultural changes […]
Disclosure enjoys a unique position within the spectrum of campaign finance regulation. It is the only regulation that courts have looked upon with consistent approval. Since Buckley v. Valeo, courts have upheld disclosure requirements as advancing an “informational interest”—very broadly defined as the interest in educating voters about the sponsors behind political messages. Disclosure’s informational interest has been deemed...
Introduction American party politics may be as nationally competitive as they have ever been, but at the same time they are perhaps as unresponsive to average citizens as they have been in a long time. It is this paradox that Professor Tabatha Abu El-Haj creatively interrogates in her essay, Networking the Party: First Amendment Rights […]