First Amendment News

Margaret Sullivan of The Washington Post, June 5, 2022, warns that in retweeting or posting an arresting article, a reader should be aware that the article may not be a product of local news but rather fake news concocted to promote a political stance. Such a story emerged recently that a suburban Chicago school was assigning grades partly based on skin color or ethnicity. The article was published by the West Cook News, whose aim

Georgetown lecturer Ilya Shapiro was reinstated last week after the university suspended him for a tweet saying that President Joe Biden was not nominating the best pick to the Supreme Court but a “lessor Black woman.” (The Hill, June 2, 2022, by Monique Beals) Rather than accept his reinstatement and the conditions it specifies, Shapiro choose to resign. “IDEAA [Georgetown’s Office of Institutional Diversity, Equity and Affirmative Action],” writes Shapiro, “asserts that if I ‘were

Signalling that they would likely consider the case at a later time, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 to grant an injunction against a Texas law prohibiting social media platforms from removing posts based on content. (The New York Times, May 31, 2022, by Adam Liptak) Law professor Ilya Somin in Reason, May 31, 2022, writes that with a 5-4 decision, there is cause to think that at least five justices think the Texas law

The judge in Sarah Palin’s libel case versus The New York Times denied her request for a new trial with a rebuke that she did not provide any evidence that the Times was driven by actual malice. (HuffPost, May 31, 2022, by Larry Neumeister of The Associated Press) While the Times had admittedly made an error in connecting her statements to a mass shooting, federal district Judge Jed S. Rakoff wrote, “a mistake is not

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis suffered a major setback in his efforts to defend former President Donald Trump’s right to lie on social media. The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a Florida law prohibiting the platforms from banning political candidates violated social media companies’ First Amendment rights. The appellate judge wrote, “The government can’t tell a private person or entity what to say or how to say it.” (MSN, May 31, 2022, by the