Copyright and authorship: reading Thomas Streeter's Selling the Air
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?
Neil Richards on "Reconciling Data Privacy and the First Amendment"
In “Reconciling Data Privacy and the First Amendment,” argues that 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.”
Thinking about privacy and the First Amendment
This post is about Eugene Volokh’s article on free speech and privacy 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?
Free speech and broadcasting: Cohen v. California and FCC v. Pacifica Foundation
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.
Liberty or inflexibility: reading Antonin Scalia
Antonin Scalia, current Supreme Court justice and originalist extraordinaire, wrote “Common-Law Courts in a Civil Law System” as a part of A Matter of Interpretation: Federal Courts and the Law. In it explains his approach to legal reasoning and especially to Constitutional interpretation, and especially rejects both legislative history and the so-called “living Constitution” of liberal justices like Stephen Breyer.
Was early Supreme Court Justice John Marshall an originalist?
The question of whether John Marshall, Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court from 1803 – 1835, was an originalist is, of course, anachronistic, as the term had not yet been invented during his lifetime. Still, given the ongoing controversy regarding judicial interpretation today, it’s an interesting question to ask about one of the foundational justices in American jurisprudence.
Presenting "Privacy & The Telegraph"
A slideshow presentation of my talk on the shifting views on privacy, from the nineteenth century’s focus on property and relationships to the twentieth’s focus on people as having an individual right to privacy.
Confidentiality vs. privacy
In the law, there is a difference between confidentiality and privacy, and it’s a difference that’s important for both legal history (highlighted by the 20th century focus on the right to privacy in American law, as opposed to a 19th century focus on confidentiality) and contemporary law.
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