First Amendment News

As the the election nears, the Trump administration is enlisting Senate Republicans to pressure social media companies it sees as hostile to their cause. It wants Senate committees to hold hearings on Section 230 exempting platforms for liability for user posts. Republicans claim Section 230 allows social media to discriminate against conservative ideas. (Politico, October 1 2020, by Christiano Lima and John Hendel) President Trump is also engaged in an attempt to ban TikTok and

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education released its rankings of colleges for their support of free speech on campus. They found The University of Chicago ranked first and DePauw University the worst with Ivy League schools under performing. Liberal students were more likely to accept the use of violence to silence campus speakers, and nearly one-third of students in the survey would not allow President Donald Trump to speak on campus. (FIRE, September 29,

President Donald Trump’s allies are calling for a criminal investigation of The New York Times reporters for breaking the law in reporting on the president’s tax returns. One such ally cites 216 U.S. Code7213 that says it’s illegal to disclose tax returns. But while it is possible that the information was leaked illegally, the Times reporters are unlikely to suffer any legal repercussions. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2001 that the First Amendment protected

A federal judge ruled that Homeland Security must release records of Covid-19 cases in immigration detention centers and Border Patrol stations. University of Chicago Law School investigators filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the information in June. They said the release “would allow the public to understand the extent and the nature of the crisis clearly occurring within Southern California detention centers and take informed steps to address and mitigate that crisis.” The

The Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals dealt a blow to an Indian band who has spent years trying to build a hotel/casino on an abandoned naval base owned by the city of Richmond. The court ruled that tribal sovereign immunity was rendered moot through litigation in federal district court so that a nonprofit environmental group could hold the city to adhere to the Brown Act, the state’s open meeting law, in any settlement over