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. The location for this position is either at our Washington, D.C. office or remotely anywhere in the United States.
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.
Supreme Court
NBC News: Supreme Court asks Maryland, Virginia officials to stop people picketing at justices’ houses
By Pete Williams
Gail Curley, the Supreme Court’s marshal, has written to the governors of Maryland and Virginia and local officials in suburban Washington, D.C., asking them to enforce state and county laws that prohibit picketing at private homes.
In the letter to Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, a Republican, she said laws in his state prohibits assembling “with another in a manner that disrupts a person’s right to tranquility in the person’s home,” and provides a penalty of up to 90 days in jail.
When the demonstrations began, after the draft Supreme Court abortion opinion was leaked in May, Hogan said he was “deeply concerned” that hundreds of people were picketing outside the homes of some justices who live in his state.
“Since then, protest activity at justices’ homes, as well as threatening activity, has only increased,” Curley said in the letter, with large groups using bullhorns and banging drums. “This is exactly the kind of conduct that Maryland and Montgomery County laws prohibit.”
Reason (Volokh Conspiracy): Residential Picketing and Abortion
By Eugene Volokh
So the rule seems clear: Content-neutral bans on residential picketing are constitutionally permissible. And that would apply whether the residence is that of an abortion provider or that of a Justice who ruled that the Constitution doesn’t secure abortion rights. Perhaps Justices Brennan and Marshall (and possibly Stevens, though his position in Frisby was more complex) were right to reject this, and to conclude that people should be free to picket outside the homes of everyone (again, abortion providers or others)…
UPDATE: For more on whether the bans being discussed in this situation are indeed content-neutral and therefore valid, see this post as to Maryland and this post as to Virginia. (Summary: Maryland law very likely invalid, Virginia law likely invalid, Montgomery County ordinance likely valid.)
Candidates and Campaigns
Washington Post: Trump cracks down on deceptive fundraising by others using his name
By Michael Scherer and Josh Dawsey
Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich has spent months groundlessly telling Republicans that they can be on “Trump’s Team” or “Endorse Trump for President in 2024” by giving to his U.S. Senate campaign.
“Are you turning your back on Pres. Trump?” one Brnovich fundraising ad asked last year. “Renew your 2022 membership before it is too late.”
Such appeals pushed the actual team of advisers around Trump to a breaking point in June, after Trump endorsed Brnovich’s rival, Blake Masters, for the Senate seat in Arizona. In a cease-and-desist letter obtained by The Washington Post, an attorney for Save America, Trump’s political action committee, threatened legal action if Brnovich did not stop using Trump’s image and name in misleading ways.
The States
Reason (Volokh Conspiracy): S.C. Bill Would Apparently Outlaw News Sites’ Writing About Legal Abortion Clinics in Neighboring States
By Eugene Volokh
The South Carolina state Senate is considering a bill that would basically ban abortions, with no exception other than for abortions needed to “designed or intended to prevent the death of a pregnant woman” …
The law’s ban on “knowingly or intentionally aid[ing or] abet[ting]” an abortion “includes, but is not limited to knowingly and intentionally,”
(1) providing information to a pregnant woman, or someone seeking information on behalf of a pregnant woman, by telephone, internet, or any other mode of communication regarding self-administered abortions or the means to obtain an abortion, knowing that the information will be used, or is reasonably likely to be used, for an abortion; [or]
(2) hosting or maintaining an internet website, providing access to an internet website, or providing an internet service purposefully directed to a pregnant woman who is a resident of this State that provides information on how to obtain an abortion, knowing that the information will be used, or is reasonably likely to be used for an abortion.
