First Amendment News

The U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear an appeal of an Oregon free speech case. A 2004 lawsuit against the Bush administration claimed that Secret Service discriminated against anti-Bush demonstrators by keeping Bush supporters in place but moving the demonstrators two blocks away from the president’s hotel. (NewsMax, November 26, 2013, by Bloomberg News) The Court is also looking at a California case in which John David Apel, a protester at the Vandenberg Air Force

The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press (RCFOP) is leading a challenge to a ruling by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) denying standing to a legal challenge by a Yale law school clinic. The RCFOP claims the ruling violated the First Amendment right to court proceedings that should be open to all members of the public. (RCFOP press release, November 26, 2013) The ruling held that the American Civil Liberties Union alone had

A federal district judge ruled that former Detroit Free Press reporter David Ashenfelter could use the Fifth Amendment to refuse to release the name of a source in an article about Richard Covertino, a former U.S. attorney who was under investigation for mishandling a terrorism trial. Covertino sued the Department of Justice for an alleged illegal leak of information to Ashenfelter. (Detroit Free Press, November 25, 2013, by Jim Schaefer) “Ashenfelter claimed the[Fifth Amendment] privilege

President Barack Obama’s speech on immigration in San Francisco’s Chinatown was  interrupted by a man who urged him to stop all deportations by executive order. The president responded by stopping the man’s ejection from the room and addressing the issue of whether he as president could use his power to stop deportations. (Politico, November 25, 2013, by Jennifer Epstein) In asking security to not remove the man, Obama said, “I respect the passion of these