donal brown

Brown University President Christina H. Paxson in The New York Times, April 21, 2023, argues states are the real threat to campus free speech. She cites laws in Florida, Idaho and Georgia that restrict what professors can teach and scores of other bills pending that limit what students can learn. A FIRE report shows an alarming increase in attempts to punish higher education scholars in the past three years with 52 percent of the attempts

The 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals upheld a California law outlawing honking your car horn for anything other than warning of danger. A woman honked her horn 14 times to support a protest at Representative Darrell Issa’s offices and after she was cited filed a lawsuit claiming the citation violated her free speech rights. FAC’s David Loy said the California Highway Patrol failed to present facts showing the dangers of unauthorized horn honking. Loy

A New Hampshire baker is suing his town over a mural done by local students of donuts and early morning sun that sits above his bakery. Conway officials determined that the mural was an ad rather than art and violated the town’s sign ordinance, and by a small margin the citizens voted in a town meeting to back the officials. (The Christian Science Monitor, April 13, 2023, by Sohie Hills) The mural was four times

Jack Shafer of Politico, April 18, 2023, writes that the Fox payout of $787.3 million in the Dominion Voting systems defamation case released them from the prospect of a torturous courtroom experience of putting Rupert Murdoch and prominent Fox hosts on the stand. And Fox won’t have to make public statements about their lies or change their ways of doing things. “…the Fox hosts that helped push Donald Trump’s stolen election lies on a gullible

In considering a case to define “true threats,” the U.S. Supreme Court seemed to favor a narrow rule for determining when speech loses First Amendment protection. During arguments in Counterman v. Colorado, about a man convicted of stalking a musician, the court was interested in whether the man intended to cause fear rather than how the musician felt. (Bloomberg Law, April 19, 2023, by Kimberly Strawbridge Robinson) The musician said she “extremely scared” by the