donal brown

In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade, pro-choice advocates are concerned that states will use online postings in criminal prosecutions. The National Right to Life Committee has written model legislation prohibiting “instructions over the telephone, the internet, or any other medium of communication” or “hosting or maintaining a website, or providing internet service, that encourages or facilitates efforts to obtain an illegal abortion.” (The Verge, June 25, 2022, by

Journalists covering the school massacre in Uvalde, Texas have been treated as enemies by police, threatened with arrest and harassed by self-appointed “Guradians of the Children.” In attempting to get at the details of the poor police response to the shootings, reporters have been barred from public meetings and refused information about how the police conducted themselves on May 24. (The Washington Post, June 28, 2022, by Arelis R. Hernandez and Paul Farhi) Reporters are

The U.S. Supreme Court refused to consider Coral Ridge Ministries Media v. South Poverty Law Center (SPLC), delaying consideration of the actual malice standard in defamation cases. The Eleventh Circuit had ruled that the SPLC had not acted with actual malice in adding the ministries to its Hate Map. (The Verge, June 27, 2022, by Adi Robertson) In dissent Justice Clarence Thomas wrote, “This case is one of many showing how New York Times and

Elizabeth Nolan Brown, Reason, June 23,2022, writes that given the history of ads about abortion, free speech concerning those ads is destined to become a major issue given the recent Supreme Court decision over turning Roe v. Wade. Even after the Supreme Court ruled in Virginia v. Bigelow that bans on ads for abortion services violated the First Amendment, laws remained on the books. One problem likely to arise concerns social media platforms running pro-choice

The Dominion defamation lawsuit against Fox got a boost from Delaware judge Eric Davis who ruled that there was adequate showing that Fox was culpable in its false claim that Dominion was part of a national voter-fraud conspiracy to deprive then-President Donald Trump of victory in the 2020 election. In refusing to dismiss the lawsuit, Davis wrote, “Dominion alleges that: (1) Rupert Murdoch ‘controls everything’ within Fox News; (2) when viewership of Fox News declined