First Amendment News

A federal district judge dismissed a lawsuit by an election-denier group claiming that voting rights groups defamed its members. The voting rights groups had earlier sued the U.S. Election Integrity Plan, election-deniers, for intimidating voters after the 2020 election. The judge dismissed the claims under the legal principal that potentially defamatory statements in a lawsuit are protected if pertaining to allegations of wrongdoing. (The Gazette, January 26, 2023, by Michael Karlik)

NPR and The New York Times are suing to obtain documents in the Dominion Voting systems defamation lawsuit against Fox News. The lawsuit cited “profound public interest” in the Dominion case, particularly “how a broadcast network fact-checked and presented to the public the allegations that the 2020 Presidential election was stolen and that plaintiff was to blame.” The courts are blocking access to scores of documents in the case. (CNN, January 25,2023, by Oliver Darcy)

The Joint Chief of Staff Mark Milley testified before the January 6 committee that he classified records of the Pentagon’s conduct on January 6 even though they did not meet the criterion of top secret information. Milley acted to control the story. Over classification of government records for political reasons undermines the public’s trust in the classification system, argues Stewart Baker in Lawfare, January 23, 2023.

A federal judge in South Carolina removed a ban on automated collection of online court records, a process known as scraping. The NAACP and ACLU wants to use scraping to locate eviction notices to assist tenants in fighting them. The state may still provide other alternatives to providing the information. (Techdirt, January 24, 2023, by Tim Cushing) A ruling last year by the Ninth Circuit found that scraping does not violate the Computer Fraud and

The Fifth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals is considering a lawsuit brought by a citizen journalist protesting her arrest, charges later dismissed, for publishing information obtained from a police officer before it was made public. The Loredo, Texas journalist claims that what she was doing was routine journalism, but Loredo lawyers said Priscilla Villarreal went through back channels, had an intent to benefit from the publication, and it was conduct, not free speech at issue.