“Silos” by Sean Kelly. CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

The push for “privacy” that demands an ability to allow us to restrict who sees what–enabled, for example, by new tools in Facebook and Google+–also creates and reinforces silos (filter bubbles, echo chambers) that prevent our exposure to different ideas. But  this move highlights potential conflicts between a number of rights: freedom of association and freedom of speech and the press (both from the First Amendment) and rights to privacy (from the First, Fourth, Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendments). What is this conflict? Is it real? How can we (begin) to resolve it?

The Marketplace of Ideas

Core to many American arguments on behalf of the value to a liberal democracy (in the old sense of liberal) of the freedom to speak is the concept of a “marketplace of ideas,” articulated by both Thomas Jefferson and, perhaps most persuasively, by John Stuart Mill in On Liberty. The idea is that only through free and prolific competition amongst ideas, achieved through open discussion, can one ascertain truth and, in turn, advance society. Without hearing falsehoods, one can never be sure of one’s truth, and through proving something false one verifies and re-invigorates truth and beliefs. But without the competition, truth is unobtainable, and even if obtained, belief in it becomes enervated and weak. Constant exposure to different viewpoints is absolutely key to a functioning, progressing society.

Republic.com and the Problem of Silos

In 2002, prolific author Cass Sunstein (in Republic.com, then again in Republic.com 2.0 in 2007) expressed deep concern about exactly this, arguing that trends in individualizing information flow were as harmful to democracy as were trends to centralize information control. In other words, having 1,000 individual silos tailored to personal interests could limit the free-flow of ideas as much as (or more than) having, say, three sources of broadcast news once did. In either case we would limit our exposure to diverse viewpoints and, in the individualized, modern case, also limit the beneficial unifying effect that shared viewpoints provided.

Free Speech and Privacy

This concern is different, though possibly related, to that expressed by Eugene Volokh in regards to free speech and privacy. His argument is with governmental regulations/laws/decisions that attempt to protect privacy by restricting what other people can say. That is, privacy laws that prevent, for example, a journalist from writing about my medical history infringe on the First Amendment.

In contrast to governmental action, the impact of speech silos on democracy is not a question of infringement on private liberties. Instead, through purely private decisions, freely achieved by my own decisions and without interference from government, the same pernicious, long-term impact on democracy and liberty is achieved. In one case, government blocks the sharing of ideas to protect me, while in the other, I block my own sharing of, and my own exposure to, the ideas of others. But in both cases, the marketplace is undermined.

But in the case of government regulations, the Constitution can be invoked as an authority, while in the case of Facebook and Google+ privacy settings, there is no legal check aimed at preserving the marketplace of ideas. Arguments for liberty, which appear to fruitfully favor a multiplicity of viewpoints in the case of government regulations that restrict speech in the name of privacy, instead favor allowing individuals and companies to enable avoiding the kinds of other viewpoints that Mill–and Volokh–argue are valuable for a liberty-loving democracy. One might argue to simply get government out of the privacy game at all (since the government has encouraged Facebook, for example, to focus on allowing privacy controls)–but that doesn’t deal with the very real market ($$$, eyeballs) demand for greater control over sharing.

Sunstein advocates for a larger governmental role in overseeing media and sites in order to guarantee that people have the option, at least, of exposure to a myriad of viewpoints. (Exactly how one might do this is far from clear, though.) But the core of the contemporary filter problem is not one of big corporations restricting our exposure (or not that alone) to new ideas. Instead, it is our own individual choices to limit our own exposure to alternative viewpoints that is to blame. A benevolent dictator might be able to counteract this trend, but a liberal democracy cannot (or can it?) do so through government fiat. The conflict, then, is not so much between constitutional rights as much as it is a conflict between core values: privacy and control vs. exposure and learning.

Education

So how can we attempt to solve this conundrum? An effective K-12 educational system, backed up by a robust university education, is the best societal approach I can imagine. (Individual parents can help, too.) A classroom is one of the few locations where we as a society have the chance to force people to be exposed to new ideas. Teaching and inspiring students to seek out alternative perspectives and critically analyze them–without rejecting the new and unusual out of hand–is perhaps the least coercive method I can imagine for maintaining a marketplace of ideas in the face of tools that enable an individual to opt out.

But I’m open to other ideas, so if you have any, please share!

Related articles

• Thinking about privacy and the First Amendment (inpropriapersona.com)
• The Echo Chamber Revisited (On the Media, npr.org)
• The Filter Bubble (amazon.com)

“Visible downgrading” by Alex Wellerstein. CC BY 2.0 license.

The concept of “privacy”–as in “the right to privacy”–can be understood in a number of ways. This multitude of potential meanings and uses is partly why the concept is controversial, confusing, and perhaps even contradictory. Previously I have discussed the difference in perceptions of privacy in the 19th century, where the legal focus seemed to be more on “confidentiality” than what we have come to understand as “privacy” today. That is, the 19th century concern was with maintaining trust relationships between people rather than with protecting either secrecy or autonomy (although that is not to say that these were not valued).

Autonomy

This changed with the 1890 publication of the Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis law review article called “The Right to Privacy.” In this article, Warren and Brandeis are actually concerned with something more akin to autonomy than secrecy: “from Greek autonomia, from autonomos  ‘having its own laws,’ from autos ‘self’ + nomos ‘law’” (from Apple’s dictionary app).  That is, allowing people to control their own self-identity, rather than allowing it to be exploited by (for example) yellow journalists. Secrecy, on the other hand, is about keeping something away from the knowledge of others. The concepts are related, but distinct and different, and require different legal approaches.

“Paparazzi” by Clément Seifert. CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 licensed.

The Warren and Brandeis article advocated for the protection of a person’s “inviolate personality” and the “fundamental right to be let alone.” They were not concerned with illegal government searches of private residences–or even the trespasses of journalists in private land–but rather with the publication and dissemination of information that, they believed, most properly belonged to a person. In other words, their approach was akin to a broad notion of copyright or “right of publicity,” because it proposed allowing people to control the publication of their own likeness (photos of themselves, for example). Such control was based on a kind of “moral right,” in a sense, to own one’s own self, or to be “autonomous.” The implications of a right to control the publication of information about one’s self has the potential to conflict with the First Amendment rights of others in a way that a right to privacy as secrecy might not.

In 1928, now a Supreme Court justice, Brandeis wrote in dissent in Olmstead v. U.S. that the right to privacy was the “right to be left alone–the most comprehensive of rights, and the right most valued by a free people.” Cornell’s Legal Information Institute explains that the right to privacy has thus “developed into a liberty of personal autonomy protected by the 14th amendment.” The focus on a “right to privacy” as “a liberty of personal autonomy” is why the Fourteenth Amendment (due process and equal protection), and not the Fourth Amendment (search and seizure), is often so important today when discussing privacy, and is the constitutional underpinning for key decisions like Roe v. Wade.

Secrecy

“Completely Tapped” by Byung Kyu Park. CC BY-SA 2.0 license.

A right to secrecy is most closely aligned with the Fourth Amendment (search and seizure) and with trespass, and less with the “penumbra” of due process or equal protection. A right to keep things secret is also about “inviolability” in some sense. Thus, in Olmstead, Brandeis could argue that a wiretap could intrude on a “right to privacy”–the “right to be let alone”–as part of a violation of the Fourth Amendment, even though no publication or dissemination had necessarily occurred. A right to autonomy, to protect one’s self, might well require a right to secrecy in a case involving wiretaps, but it has less value in protecting abortion rights, for example, where the real question is one of self-determination, not secrecy.

Approaching a right to secrecy legally, one might prosecute an overzealous journalist not for the publication of embarrassing information–and certainly not for photos taken in public places–but for a trespass involved in obtaining private letters. In some cases, the First Amendment might still be implicated (think of the Pentagon Papers), but the restraint on speech is much weaker when what is being restricted is not directly the publication of materials, but rather the manner in which they were obtained.

In this sense, then, data privacy laws–which Eugene Volokh, for example, has explained are in many ways in conflict with the First Amendment–might be more readily disentangled from that constitutional problem if they are realigned with traditional laws against trespass. The law, then, would not be focused on preventing publication (although that might be an issue still, and might still have First Amendment implications), but rather on punishing transgressions or trespasses.

Copyright law is often approached in terms of debates over competing interpretations of the law: should copyright be used to protect the author’s freedom, or to encourage the public distribution of culture and information, or to turn intellectual products into marketplace commodities, or to serve the interests of corporate publishers and distributors?

He then explains that, at least in the Western–and perhaps especially in the American–tradition, “copyright is the enactment of the dream that the disparate goals and values of individual creative freedom, commerce, and informational dissemination can be reconciled in law.”

In the United States, copyright has always served a functional purpose:

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries  (Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the United States Constitution).

Drawing on this, Streeter writes that:

From the beginning, therefore, copyright was understood more in functional than in formal or moral terms; the emphasis was more on copyright’s role in encouraging the distribution of culture and information than on its inherent justice.

American law depends on conceptual distinctions, particularly originality and the distinction between an idea and its expression, that are derived from the romantic image of authorship as an act of original creation whose uniqueness springs from and is defined in terms of the irreducible individuality of the writer.

But, Streeter points out, modern broadcast mediums–especially television, but also music, movies, and more–do not have individual “authors,” and yet our legal approaches to copyright still assume some notion of an individual author or creator.

One way the law has handled this is through the fictional “corporate person” who now owns copyrights and substitutes for individual creative humans. These large bureaucratic institutions now “create” most modern works, but still argue that consumers have a moral right to compensate them for their creation in a way that tends to invoke romantic authorship–and breaks down when the “creator” is a large multinational corporation.

Corporations have responded to create bureaucratic enforcement mechanisms, so-called “copyright collectives,” such as ASCAP and BMI. These groups create licensing arrangements that only roughly correspond to “actual” use or “actual” creators (and often strike me as rather reminiscent of a protection racket…).

New technologies that have emerged after Streeter’s book hold the potential for revolutionizing this relationship, although Amazon, Netflix, Hulu, Spotify, et. al. fundamentally do nothing about the problem of corporate content creation. They do, however, re-enable the possibility of individual creators (if such a thing really exists…) to escape the old bureaucratic confines and to more directly connect with consumers via mediators that can reduce the communications and collections overhead.

So is this really a revolution? Perhaps–but as I said, it does nothing about the major point of Streeter that much of today’s media has no individual creator at all. In such a case, these new technologies merely permit more efficient collection, cutting back on the number of “middlemen,” but don’t otherwise revolutionize anything at all.

By Karsten Schmidt

In “Thinking about privacy and the First Amendment,” I discussed Eugene Volokh’s critique of privacy laws in relation to  Samuel D. Warren and Louis D. Brandeis’s 1890 law review arti­cle, “The Right to Privacy.” In “Cyberspace and Privacy: A New Legal Paradigm?,” Volokh argues that “the right to information privacy–my right to control your communication of personally identifiable information about me–is a right to have the government stop you from speaking about me.”

In “Reconciling Data Privacy and the First Amendment,” Neil Richards takes issue with Volokh’s arguments. Richards instead argues that, most importantly, privacy regulation is not speech regulation at all, and, additionally, that in commercial contexts at least, “speech restrictions … have never triggered heightened First Amendment scrutiny.” In other words, either the data being protected isn’t “speech” in the legal sense, or “because they are legitimate speech regulations under existing doctrine.”

Scope

Richards advocates that courts should first consider whether a privacy rule even regulates what falls within the scope of the First Amendment. To explain “scope,” Richards points out that many normal criminal laws punish “speech,” but fall outside the scope of the First Amendment: fraud, criminal threats, conspiracies, and solicitation of criminal acts, for example. Additional non-criminal laws constrain speech “in the context of securities, antitrust, labor organizing, copyrights, trademarks, sexual harassment … and vast amounts of evidence and tort law.” These too are considered outside the scope of the First Amendment. Why should privacy laws be any different?

Richards proposes an approach to treating scope that draws on concepts used in other Constitutional jurisprudence. He suggests using “rational basis” review for legal rules involving the commercial trade in customer data, but using higher levels of scrutiny for “privacy rules that restrict speech.” Disclosure of “newsworthy facts” would warrant strict scrutiny, while lesser-protected speech (telemarketing, photography) would receive “intermediate scrutiny under the commercial speech doctrine.”

Categories of Information Processing

To better analyze and target rules for different parts of information processing in the context of potentially private data, Richards proposes four different stages, only two of which potentially fall within the scope of the First Amendment at all:

1. rules governing the collection of information,
2. rules governing the use of such information,
3. rules governing the disclosure of information,
4. regulation of direct marketing.

Stages 1 and 2 can be safely regulated without bringing the rules within the scope of the First Amendment, while stage 3 can be regulated under commercial speech rules. Stage 4 clearly falls within the First Amendment, but current doctrine already permits extensive regulation of such speech.

Conclusion

In the end, then, Richards argues that “when we subject both data privacy regulations and the First Amendment to careful scrutiny, they can be reconciled without sacrificing either.” Although Volokh’s critique of privacy laws as violations of the First Amendment is rhetorically powerful, I find Richards’ arguments more compelling, as well as more reconcilable with positive societal goals. This last point is perhaps not enough on which to base a legal argument, but I appreciate legal arguments that support such ends in a rational and articulate manner.

By Robert Horwitz

Robert Horwitz’s The Irony of Regulatory Reform: The Deregulation of American Telecommunications, published in 1989, explores in depth the issue of telecommunications regulation at a time when telecommunications was once again in transition. My own interest is in the revolutions in communications technologies that occurred with the spread of American post offices in the 18th century, the telegraph in the 19th, and the telephone–and then radio, TV, and cable–in the 20th. Horwitz writes:

Telecommunications constitutes one of the four essential modes or channels that permit trade and discourse among members of a society, the other three being transportation, energy utilities, and the system of currency exchange, or money. … These services are “connective” institutions. They are central to the circulation of capital and literally constitute both the foundation and the limit for the overall functioning of a society. This is why … they are called infrastructures.

In 1989, deregulation of industries overseen by agencies created during the New Deal was in full swing. The irony for Horwitz is that “deregulation has most strongly affected those regulatory agencies whose actions have been least odious to business.” Thus, agencies created later and earlier than the New Deal were largely unaffected.

History

Looking backwards, Horwitz says that the “emergency of regulatory agencies constituted the building of a national administrative structures in a state which had been institutionally localistic and court-centered.” He argues that in the 19th century, the courts provided the oversight of economic development that would eventually be taken over by modern administrative agencies. This changed in the 1890s, after laissez-faire economic principles had created “a general crisis of social control.” The era of big business necessitated an (eventual) government response.

Image via Wikipedia

The Progressive Era saw the first new regulatory bodies emerge, largely “in response to popular political activism.” This gave us what would become the Food and Drug Administration, the Justice Department’s antitrust division, and the Federal Trade Commission. New Deal agencies, on the other hand, were created to bring stability to specific markets, and was generally greeted with enthusiasm by businesses desperate for such stability. In the 1960s and 70s, the regulatory focus shifted to more general social protections, especially of citizens as a whole. This was the era of the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

The New Regulatory Agencies of the 20th Century

Regulatory agencies of the 20th century are a new phenomenon. According to Horwitz,

Regulatory agencies constitute a new structure of federal political power in the American political system; they represent a mixture of legislative, executive, and judicial functions.

In the American system of separated powers, they are an odd delegation of Congressional power: legislatively created, administered by the executive branch, and often given quasi-judicial responsibilities to hear and decide cases (with judicial review, of course, the level of which has varied over time).

Image via Wikipedia

While industry regulation serves a certain level of private interest–especially in the creation of stability–much regulation involves what Horwitz calls the “public interest”: “something larger, something more general.” Although the 20th-century regulatory agency was a new beast in the United States, “the construction and maintenance of infrastructures usually have been the responsibility of governments” as far back as 13th-century England (in the Anglo-American tradition, at least–but remember that the Roman state built aqueducts and roads much earlier, for example).

In the United States, the Commerce Clause justified federal government intervention. Because this economically focused rationale underpins the American regulatory approach, Horwitz argues that, “[i]f there is a general concept of the public interest informing state intervention into infrastructure industries, it is a commerce-based concept.” Thus, in regulation transportation, “nondiscrimination” has been key. The goal? To ensure “[t]hat carriers would serve the needs of commerce rather than inhibit commerce.”

Image via Wikipedia

In telecommunications, the “common carrier principle is really little more than a commerce-based notion of the public interest.” It “guaranteed access to the means of transmission.” Granting individual people access was really just “a logical extension of expanding the marketplace.” But despite this limited original impetus, “common carrier law embraces principles broader than commerce” as it made the telephone “available (in principle) to all citizens.”

Liberty

Image via Wikipedia

Telecommunications, though, involves essential aspects of liberty, especially the ideals of “free speech” embodied in the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. Freedom of commerce does connect to freedom of speech is historically linked to the liberal (in the tradition of Locke and Mill) ideology of the free market. Thus, the ideology of free speech has for many years been to encourage the “marketplace of ideas.” The assumption, says Horwitz, is that “a democratic public sphere will emerge consequent to the unimpeded, private actions of speech-entrepreneurs.”

But what happens when those “speech-entrepreneurs” are a few powerful corporations who demand significant money to utilize their infrastructure? The result can be that “those with wealth can disseminate their views, the First Amendment ‘right’ of most citizens is merely to listen and read. Yet a free marketplace of ideas implies dialogue.”

Image via Wikipedia

Today we have the Internet and the World Wide Web, which have the potential to turn everyone into contributors as well as consumers of information. Does this mean, then, that the natural form of these new mediums reduce of eliminate the necessity of their regulation? Or is regulation still needed to maintain a “free marketplace” of both ideas and commerce?

Deregulation

Deregulation can reduce the power of established cartels and allow for innovation and novelty: “It permits the resurgence of competition and the anarchistic play of market forces.”  This, though, is certainly not in the interest of established players–so why is modern deregulation so associated with big (entrenched) business?

Partly, says Horwitz, this is due to the divergence of “administrative rationality and economic rationality.” Regulatory agencies are conservative and bureaucratic by their nature, and the logic of rules be lost even as their enforcement continues. Irrationality–and the regulatory delay of agencies struggling to apply outdated rules to a complex environment–can lead to business uncertainty instead of stability. The burden on the regulated industries thus grows over time. This was made worse as the social goals of the 1960s and 70s created “new obligations, costs, and time delays.” The result? Deregulation won out in many–but not all!–contexts.

Digital edition of “The Right to Privacy”

Part of the historical work I’ve been doing focuses on the history of privacy and the introduction of new technologies, like the telegraph. In terms of of the U.S. Constitution, I’ve been focused mostly on the Fourth Amendment (which regulates searches and seizures). However, the First Amendment’s speech protections are also potentially implicated, especially when it comes to modern information privacy law–a point Eugene Volokh explored in his 2000 law review article, “Cyberspace and Privacy: A New Legal Paradigm?”

I am not going to as fully analyze the issue here, but I wanted to begin thinking about it. To do this, I’m going to think about Volokh’s points in relation to Samuel D. Warren and Louis D. Brandeis’s 1890 law review article, “The Right to Privacy.” This highly influential piece advocated for “the fundamental right to be let alone.” But is it impossible to reconcile such a right with an equally compelling right to free speech?

Of course, the right to “free speech” is not an absolute right, and there are many constraints (yelling “fire” in a crowded theater is, of course, classic). But still, the requirement that the government “shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press” is explicitly written in the Constitution, whereas the “right to privacy” is part of its “penumbra.” So perhaps the debate is easier for originalists like Antonin Scalia, who can end the debate by asserting that the original meaning of the Constitution does not include a right to privacy, but it does include a free speech provision.

The Warren and Brandeis article attacks the new gossip columns and photographs made possible by new technologies of the era. They connect their argument for the protection of a person’s “inviolate personality” to the protections afforded, via copyright for example, to “personal writings and all other personal productions, not against theft and physical appropriation, but against publication in any form” (206).

Volokh quickly dispenses with arguments that copyright, despite its restrictions on speech, is itself barred by the First Amendment, primarily on the grounds that courts have not allowed “intellectual property owners the power to suppress facts” (1065, citing to Harper & Row v. Nation Enterprises). Thus, I may publish a cutting-edge exploration of new historical materials I spent years digging out of the archives and while you may not simply photocopy and redistribute my work, you can write your own work drawing on all the labor I spent bringing forth these new facts. (See also, “You do not get an ‘A for effort’ with copyright.”)

But do I have a right to prevent the publication of personal facts about me, however embarrassing they may be? (Remember, copyright protects my creative expression, not the bare facts themselves, so it’s no help here.) What about restrictions on publishing my criminal history? Or my video rental history? Or  my credit card purchasing history?

If I obtain these items via a contractual arrangement, Volokh says, there is no problem, because enforcing contractual restrictions on speech does not offend the Constitution. But what if I get them without agreeing to a contract? Can the government still prohibit their publication? Volokh says there is a problem here (1092–94).

Very often, free speech protections are analyzed under a “marketplace of ideas” paradigm. In this analysis, we need speech–and allowing it is good–because it contributes to our ability to make decisions, and the greater the marketplace, the better decisions we can make. Bad ideas are countered by more speech, not by restricting their entry into the marketplace.

My criminal history and credit card history are certainly good information to have if you are evaluating me for a job or elected office, so in a marketplace analysis, they shouldn’t be suppressed. But there is a realm of “non-public-concern” topics that can be restricted (accidental nudity, for example)–but Volokh suggests this is too slippery of a concept to function as an effective test (1094–95).

Government can regulate speech if there is a “compelling state interest” (1106). Is privacy protection sufficiently compelling? Relatedly, is the penumbra-derived right to privacy sufficient to counter free speech arguments?

Volokh argues that privacy rights are “statutory or common-law” derived, and are not “analogous to a constitutional right” (1108). Furthermore, the First Amendment only prevents government interference with speech, not private actions to interfere with it; thus, privacy rights might well only protect against government violations, not allow for government to regulate non-government interference with privacy.

Volokh attacks Warren and Brandeis most directly when he writes:

On the other hand, if the claim is that the ability of private parties to communicate personal information about others
by itself “destroy[s] individual dignity and integrity and emasculate[s] individual freedom and independence,” “deprive[s people] of [their] individuality,” makes it impossible for “intimate relationships [to] exist,” or denies that a person’s “existence is his own,” such a claim is simply false.

This is pretty close to the argument that Warren and Brandeis make when they attack gossip columns. But even if the claim is true, Volokh says restricting publication to protect this is unconstitutional:

Under current constitutional doctrine, the answer seems to be no. Though the Supreme Court has sometimes left open the door to the possibility of restricting truthful speech simply on those grounds, the general trend of the cases cuts against this: Even offensive, outrageous, disrespectful, and dignity-assaulting speech is constitutionally protected.

It seems to me pretty clear that Volokh does not agree with Warren and Brandeis. I still think there’s potential for an alternative approach that might allow for certain kinds of privacy protection without overly violating the U.S.‘s very strong speech protections (note that this isn’t a problem generally in Europe, which permits much greater restrictions on speech when it serves as a protection against, for example, Nazism), but it’s not yet obvious to me what approach would be.

Related articles

• Knowingly False Statements of Fact and the First Amendment (volokh.com)

“George Carlin” by mindelei (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Balancing strong First Amendment (“free speech”) speech protections with the desire to protect the delicate sensibilities of America’s youth is always a complex task. Two seminal Supreme Court cases–Cohen v. California and FCC v. Pacifica Foundation–illustrate the struggle the Court has had to find the right path.

In Cohen, decided in 1971, the Supreme Court overturned the conviction of a man wearing a jacked in a courthouse that attacked the draft with a four-letter word (“Fuck the Draft”). In that case, Justice Harlan, writing for the majority, “one man’s vulgarity is another’s lyric,” and said that offended readers could simply turn away. A state has no right to ban profanity to maintain “civility.”

Nonetheless, in 1978 the court upheld fines imposed by the FCC on the owner of a New York radio station for broadcasting George Carlin’s “Filthy Words.” Why the difference? Is the medium of radio really so different that it requires different rules, ones that now do permit the state (in this instance, the federal government) to ban profanity? Or was Carlin’s speech in a different, less protected category than Cohen’s opinion on the draft?

The majority in FCC v. Pacifica Foundation sees no conflict with Cohen, and in fact cites Harlan’s vulgarity statement approvingly–but then proceeds to say that

content of that character [i.e., “vulgar,” “offensive,” and “shocking”] is not entitled to absolute constitutional protection under all circumstances, we must consider its context in order to determine whether the Commission’s action was constitutionally permissible.

Indeed, Cohen foresees this issue of considering the circumstances, and ties those circumstances to invasions of privacy interests, especially in the home:

The ability of government, consonant with the Constitution, to shut off discourse solely to protect others from hearing it is, in other words, dependent upon a showing that substantial privacy interests are being invaded in an essentially intolerable manner. Any broader view of this authority would effectively empower a majority to silence dissidents simply as a matter of personal predilections.

This is the exception seized upon most strongly by the majority in Pacifica Foundation:

Patently offensive, indecent material presented over the airwaves confronts the citizen, not only in public, but also in the privacy of the home, where the individual’s right to be left alone plainly outweighs the First Amendment rights of an intruder. Rowan v. Post Office Dept., 397 U. S. 728.

(Additionally, the Court also argues for the importance of protecting children–an argument that the Court in Cohen found unconvincing, but which the majority here thinks is quite important.)

In his concurrence, Justice Powell makes the case that broadcast media are uniquely capable of intruding on “unwilling adults … in their homes”:

The result turns instead on the unique characteristics of the broadcast media, combined with society’s right to protect its children from speech generally agreed to be inappropriate for their years, and with the interest of unwilling adults in not being assaulted by such offensive speech in their homes. Moreover, I doubt whether today’s decision will prevent any adult who wishes to receive Carlin’s message in Carlin’s own words from doing so, and from making for himself a value judgment as to the merit of the message and words.

Justice Brennan, though, strongly dissents, and attacks the majority for imposing its views of words and morality on the public at large:

the Court’s decision may be seen for what, in the broader perspective, it really is: another of the dominant culture’s inevitable efforts to force those groups who do not share its mores to conform to its way of thinking, acting, and speaking.

Brennan also argues that there is nothing so invasive about radio as a broadcast media that uniquely allows it to invade the home:

unlike other intrusive modes of communication, such as sound trucks, “[t]he radio can be turned off,“Lehman v. Shaker Heights, 418 U. S. 298,302 (1974)— and with a minimum of effort. As Chief Judge Bazelon aptly observed below, “having elected to receive public air waves, the scanner who stumbles onto an offensive program is in the same position as the unsuspecting passers-by in Cohen and Erznoznik [v. Jacksonville, 422 U. S. 205 (1975)]; he can avert his attention by changing channels or turning off the set.” 181 U. S. App. D. C. 132, 149, 556 F. 2d 9, 26 (1977).

In other words, for Brennan, there is nothing intrinsically different about radio. Unlike amplified sound–and like seeing a jacket with swear word on it–one can simply turn it off or turn away.

So–ignoring stare decisis–which approach do you find more persuasive? Is broadcast particularly invasive because it is transmitted into the home? Are children as a result particularly vulnerable? And what about the Internet, which while not a push medium like radio or TV, certainly enters the home?

Image via Wikipedia

As I noted earlier in Civil law’s influence on American common law: the appeal, the Roman civil law tradition (which prevails in Europe) has had a larger impact on American jurisprudence than is generally acknowledged. Indeed, although the United States considers itself a common-law country, we in fact use a system that combines common (judge-made, customary, adversarial, precedent-focused) with civil (usually statute-based and inquisitorial) law, but which in England focused on “equity” or fairness and justice.

The American legal system directly drew on the English one.  As noted above, the English legal system was really (at least) two parts: common law (the King’s Bench, Court of Common Pleas, etc.) and equity (the Courts of Chancery). The various new states, along with the federal court system, variously integrated or continued this separation–but generally emphasized the common law as the protector of the common man. This was the case even though the courts of equity had been for centuries the protector of principles of justice and fairness, while common-law courts had been seen as interested only in formal mechanisms through its rigid system of “writs.”

The relationship, though, was complex and not at all as simple as this. Common-law courts gave jury trials to those accused, and guaranteed the right to confront an accuser, while the courts of equity had no juries and took evidence in secret. Despite relying on judge-made precedents, the common-law courts became associated with Parliament against the King, while the equity courts (especially the notorious Star Chamber) dispensed royal justice (an appeal to equity was an appeal to the conscience of the king). Common-law juries refused to convict those they considered unjustly accused (especially for political reasons), regardless of the law (now called “jury nullification”). Common-law judges began to enforce both judge-made customary law and the statutes of Parliament.

Lawyers in the equity system in England were known as “civilians,” and historically had been trained in canon law. Canon law was the law of the Catholic Church, and derived from Roman civil law. With the break from Rome by Henry the VIII, the equitable system moved from an appeal to King and Pope to an appeal only to the King–but the sense of connection to Rome continued for many, and likely contributed to generally Protestant America’s suspicions of English equity.

Despite this suspicion, courts of equity were adopted into the American system in various ways. Some states kept distinct courts, others merged them, but all kept the remedies (typically, injections) afforded by the system as a necessary complement to the common-law remedies (typically, monetary awards only for non-criminal trials–though the common-law system gave us habeus corpus as a remedy against abuses of equity’s jailing of people for refusing to obey injunctions).

In effect, in both England and America, there has been an uneasy back-and-forth between courts of law and court of equity. Even when these have been merged into one body, there has been a continuing balancing and negotiation between common law’s methods and equity’s methods.

Civil law gave us the appeal to equity. Common law gave us habeas corpus and the jury. Equity gave us straightforward complaints written in the vernacular. Common law gave us the adversarial battle between attorneys. Equity gave us discovery.

In short, despite everything I was led to believe in law school, the United States (and England, for that matter) really has a hybrid civil/common-law system.

Related articles

• Civil law’s influence on American common law: the appeal (inpropriapersona.com)
• Our Inquisitorial Tradition: Equity Procedure, Due Process, and the Search for an Alternative to the Adversarial (ssrn.com)

One particular point struck me as I read through Scalia’s article: for him, focus appears to be on the freedom of government to do what it wishes, not on what is typically called the “civil liberties” of individuals. Thus, for example, Scalia writes:

Historically, and particularly in the past thirty-five years, the “evolving” Constitution has imposed a vast array of new constraints–new inflexibilities–upon administrative, judicial, and legislative action.

Thus, for example, the exclusionary rule–which forbids the “admitting in a state criminal trial evidence of guilt that was obtained by unlawful search” is not about increasing nor protecting individual liberties, but rather about decreasing the freedom of “democratic government.” Similarly, “imposing property requirements as a condition of voting” could once “be done or not done, as the society desired” is a problem because it removes rights from government, rather than a good thing because it increases the rights of individuals.

And the future agenda of constitutional evolutionists is mostly more of the same–the creation of new restrictions upon democratic government, rather than the limitation of old ones. Less flexibility in government, not more. … [G]enerally speaking, devotees of The Living Constitution do not seek to facilitate social change but to prevent it.

He acknowledges that this isn’t always the case, but then says that

those exceptions only serve to refute another argument of the proponents of an evolving Constitution, that evolution will always be in the direction of greater personal liberty.

Suddenly, and remarkably, Scalia has made the leap to connect “personal liberty” with the freedom of government to make laws. He then continues this with a discussion of his favorite personal liberties: property rights and guns. This is the argument I expected to see from him, and is a traditional (and important) dispute over which liberties are more important. But Scalia here presents them as an extension of decreasing the liberty of the government to make laws.

It’s a fascinating rhetorical move, and is perhaps even more important as a fundamental distinction that tells us something more about likely outcomes than debates about “originalism” or “textualism” do.

Spreading the news: the American postal system from Franklin to Morse By Richard R. John

In Spreading the News, Richard R. John writes about the development of the American postal system in the eighteenth century, and the police choices that leverages the system as a means of newspaper distribution.

The technological devices of the post and the newspaper were not new in the eighteenth century; horses, paper, and printing presses had been around for centuries. But the new American government prioritized newspaper delivery, and utilized postage fees from merchants to subsidize the development of profit-losing rural routes in order. Of course, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries brought to Europe a new technological development of a different kind: bureaucracies and various corporate forms that more efficiently organized people and their actions.

Nonetheless, the technologies did not determine the outcome that John discusses, but rather enabled it. Instead, it was the policy choices in Washington, D.C. that determined (retrospectively, anyway) the outcome. These policies favored newspapers and avoided using the postal system (despite the fact that in the early nineteenth century it composed roughly 3/4 of the entire federal government and federal budget) to subsidize other federal activities. The result? A sense of national–and even world–identity beyond mere connection to one’s individual state or locality.