First Amendment News

Ukraine is pleading with social media companies to take strong measures to restrict access to services within Russia, stop the spread of lies and put the whammy on Russian-backed news outlets. The prime ministers of Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia sent a letter to Google, Facebook and Twitter noting their efforts to curtail Russian lies but asking for a greater effort to suspend accounts that deny or rationalize war crimes and crimes against humanity. (The

Federal agencies dealing with thousands of Freedom of Information Act requests are famously credited with stonewalling and denying and sometimes not even delivering documents. Other times the data is turned over without organization making it difficult for journalists to extract any meaningful conclusions. A team at New York University has developed an artificial-intelligence tool to help sort through documents by relevance to the topic of investigation. (Columbia Journalism Review, March 2,2022, by Paroma Soni) For

FIRE reports that attacks on professors on ideological grounds totaled 111 in 2021, most of the incidents originating from the political left of the professor. Over 60 percent of the incidents resulted in sanctions, including investigations, suspensions and terminations. (Freedom for Individual Rights in Education, March 2, 2022, press release) Academic freedom is under assault particularly over the teaching about race and racism. Texas Lt Governor Dan Patrick is proposing to yank the tenure of

James C. Nelson, retired Montana Supreme Court justice, COUNTERPUNCH, February 21, 2022, suggests that the right to vote is a right of free speech. The Constitution protects symbolic speech, that is, nonverbal expressions in the form of protests, demonstrations, wearing buttons, t-shirts with messages, etc. Nelson says that voting is clearly a from of symbolic speech. For a Supreme Court that rules in Citizens United that money equals speech, it would seem that it should

The Supreme Court will decide if Colorado’s public accommodation law banning discrimination against gays violates the First Amendment. A woman who wants to start a business for wedding websites is asking the courts to rule that she can reject business from same-sex couples. Mark Joseph Stern in Slate, February 22, 2022, notes that heretofore the Supreme Court has rejected the idea that civil rights laws compelled expression. “It has instead described such measures as regulations