First Amendment News

The trustees of the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill reversed their denial of tenure to Black journalist Nikole Hanna-Jones. She hailed the decision as a victory for academic freedom for black writers. Hanna-Jones created the 1619 project at the New York Times, causing concerns among conservatives at UNC that the journalism school would become too associated with the project. (The News Observer, June 30, 2021, by Kate Murphy and Martha Quillin) Hannah-Jones recently refused the

The Supreme Court blocked California’s efforts to bring transparency to nonprofit charities as a way to track possible misconduct of major donors. The Court ruled 6-3, with three liberal judges in dissent, that the law violated the First Amendment’s right to freedom of association. (The New York Times, July 1, 2021, by Adam Liptak) Some Democrats are worried that the ruling will give more influence to dark money but some, the NAACP and CAIR included,

As it sometimes happens, a banal incident or unsympathetic person leads to an important Supreme Court decision upholding free speech rights. Today the Supreme Court ruled 8-1 that a high school student was punished wrongly for using the f-word on Snatchat to protest her failure to make the varsity cheer leading team. (NBC News, June 23, 2021, by Pete Williams) Writing the majority opinion, Justice Stephen Breyer said the court was not establishing that the

The European Union moving toward transparency with rules requiring multinational companies to reveal figures of revenue and taxes paid in the Union and how much in tax havens. Oxfam said the EU’s list of tax havens was incomplete so many tax haven countries would evade scrutiny. (Reuters, June 2, 2021, by Jan Strupczewski) Companies with over 750 million Euros annually would have to provide details of the taxes they pay in member states and in

The Justice Department is appealing a federal judge’s ruling ordering the release of a 2019 legal memo that then-Attorney General Bill Barr said justified not pursuing obstruction of justice charges against then-President Donald Trump after the Mueller Report came out. The DOJ said part of the memo covered the “deliberative process privilege,” protecting policy-making processes. (Law & Crime, May 25, 2021, by Jerry Lambe) Law professor Neal K. Katyal, The New York Times, May 26,