We’re Hiring!
Senior Attorney – Institute for Free Speech – Washington, DC or Virtual Office
The Institute for Free Speech is hiring a Senior Attorney with a minimum of seven years of experience.
This is a rare opportunity to work with a growing team to litigate a long-term legal strategy directed toward the protection of Constitutional rights. We challenge laws, practices, and policies that infringe upon First Amendment freedoms, such as speech codes that censor parents at school board meetings, laws restricting people’s ability to give and receive campaign contributions, and any intrusion into people’s private political associations. You would work to hold censors accountable; and to secure legal precedents clearing away a thicket of laws, regulations, and practices that suppress speech about government and candidates for political office, threaten citizens’ privacy if they speak or join groups, and impose heavy burdens on political activity.
[You can learn more about this role and apply for the position here.]
In the News
Colorado Politics: Colorado’s limits on campaign contributions in federal judge’s hands
By Michael Karlik
Litigants gave their final pitches on Thursday morning about whether a federal judge should immediately block Colorado’s constitutional limits on campaign contributions because they are so low as to violate the First Amendment.
The plaintiffs, who are three current or former Republican candidates for office, contend that the current caps on how much individuals may donate to candidates — $1,250 for a statewide candidate and $400 for a legislative candidate per election cycle — run afoul of the U.S. Supreme Court’s interpretation of what effective campaigning requires. For decades, the nation’s highest court has seen political spending as intertwined with freedom of speech.
“Ultimately, the First Amendment is not concerned with who wins. The First Amendment is concerned with maximizing the speech and the ability for candidates to get out their message,” said Daniel Burrows, an attorney with the conservative group Advance Colorado. The facts before the court, he explained, “paint the picture that challengers would not have sufficient resources to run competitive campaigns under these limits.”
The Colorado Attorney General’s Office conceded that Colorado’s caps for legislative races are the lowest in the country, and the donations allowed for statewide candidates are also near the bottom…
U.S. District Court Senior Judge John L. Kane indicated he would issue an order on the request for an injunction either later on Thursday or on Friday.
[Ed. note: Learn more about our case, Lopez v. Griswold, here.]
Supreme Court
Reason (Volokh Conspiracy): Justice Thomas (Again) Urges Reconsideration of the Scope of Section 230
By Jonathan H. Adler
[On Monday,] the Supreme Court denied certiorari in Doe v. Facebook, Inc. Justice Thomas issued an opinion respecting the denial of certiorari, repeating his suggestion that the Supreme Court should consider the scope of immunity offered to Facebook and other website publishers under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act in an appropriate case.
His brief opinion reads:
The Courts
By Timothy H.J. Nerozzi
Thirteen states have signed on to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit seeking Biden administration records on any FBI surveillance of parents protesting school boards…
Plaintiffs in the case are Indiana, Arkansas, Arizona, Georgia, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Montana, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas and Utah.
Courthouse News: Chalking arrests
A Las Vegas police officer is not entitled to qualified immunity on First Amendment claims brought by individuals who were arrested after chalking anti-police messages on sidewalks, the Ninth Circuit ruled.
Read the opinion here.
Free Expression
EJIL: Talk!: The Legal Death of Free Speech in Russia
By Marko Milanovic
The freedoms of speech and protest have been dying a long, slow death in Vladimir Putin’s Russia. What little remained has last week been dealt a mortal blow. After the EU’s decision to suspend the broadcasting licenses of RT and Sputnik within the Union, the Russian regulator Roskomnadzor blocked access to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other foreign outlets in Russia, partly on the basis that they were spreading false information about the war in Ukraine. While there is (today) no Great Russian Firewall akin to the Chinese one, and tech-savvy Russians can presumably use VPNs to evade a lot of the blocking, millions of ordinary citizens will now be cut off from large swathes of the Internet. One of the last independent media outlets, Ekho Moskvy, had to shut down after more than thirty years of operation; the TV station Dozhd (Rain) was also taken off the air:
NCAC: Free Speech and the War in Ukraine
The war between Russia and Ukraine is the latest test of our commitment to free speech. Vladimir Putin does not hesitate to censor his people, but Western democracies, and specifically the United States, are required to defend free speech. So far, they have done so. Today private actors do the censoring. Social media companies, under pressure to control disinformation, are bumbling along, blocking too much and too little. And now major cultural players in the US and Europe are canceling Russian artists, performers and anything else coming from Russia…
Cultural institutions in the US and Europe have the right, of course, to express their symbolic opposition to the war by blacklisting Russian artists. However, they must consider the full implications. Today’s cultural institutions are full of artists and performers from countries across the globe. Should all these artists be held responsible for the misdeeds of their political leaders? Should they be asked to publicly condemn these leaders when doing so puts them and members of their family at risk of retaliation by their governments? Banning Russian artists based on their political views or, worse, solely because of their nationality, while welcoming artists from China and other repressive regimes undermines any moral high ground an institution can claim.
Online Speech Platforms
Wired: Beware the Never-Ending Disinformation Emergency
By Gilad Edelman
YouTube…[disallows] claims that any past presidential election was rigged—without explicitly saying why it has that policy.
Perhaps YouTube takes [election law expert Rick] Hasen’s position that rigged-election talk undermines public confidence in elections.
“An election requires not only that you hold a fair election, but that people believe in that election that it was done fairly,” he tells WIRED. “When you undermine that, you risk undermining our entire democracy. If you believe that the last election was stolen, you’re going to be more likely to be willing to take steps to steal the next one.”
The tricky thing is that it’s hard to find the limits of that logic. In 2020, quite a few people were alarmed over the prospect that Louis DeJoy, Trump’s postmaster general, would use mail delivery slowdowns to prevent Democratic ballots from being counted. And to this day, millions of Democrats believe that the 2000 election was wrongly awarded to George W. Bush based on an inaccurate vote total in Florida. Should they not be allowed to make that argument? (Technically, YouTube’s election integrity policy forbids this claim, too.) Blocking people from questioning election results seems likely to backfire, if the goal is increasing public confidence.
By Munsif Vengattil and Elizabeth Culliford
Meta Platforms will allow Facebook and Instagram users in some countries to call for violence against Russians and Russian soldiers in the context of the Ukraine invasion, according to internal emails seen by Reuters on Thursday, in a temporary change to its hate speech policy.
The States
Atlanta Journal-Constitution: Ban on restrictions of social media content passes Georgia Senate
By Mark Niesse
Facebook and Twitter would be prohibited from deleting posts or removing users based on the views they express, according to a bill that passed the Georgia Senate on Tuesday.
The legislation, supported by Republican senators who believe social media companies have censored GOP opinions, would allow the companies to be sued in Georgia courts.
The Senate voted 33-21 to approve the measure, Senate Bill 393, which now advances to the state House…
Republican-led legislators in Florida and Texas have also passed measures regulating social media companies, but courts have put those measures on hold.
