Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

Free speech roundup

  • Coverage of Cato Constitution Day panel on First Amendment with Nadine Strossen, P.J. O’Rourke, Eric Rassbach, Ilya Shapiro [Concurring Opinions] And First-Amendment-oriented articles in the latest Cato Supreme Court Review: Judge David Sentelle on freedom of speech as liberty for all and not just for the organized press, Allen Dickerson on McCutcheon v. FEC, Ilya Shapiro on SBA List v. Driehaus, and Trevor Burrus on protest buffer zones;
  • Eric Holder “the worst Attorney General on press freedom issues in a generation, possibly since Richard Nixon’s John Mitchell” [Trevor Timm]
  • “7 Things Cracked Got Wrong About Free Speech” [Greg Lukianoff of FIRE, who has a new short book out entitled “Freedom From Speech“]
  • As ACLU recognizes, Arizona law purportedly banning revenge porn would do more than that [Masnick, Popehat, Greenfield, Sullum/Reason]
  • Critical overview of “media reform” movement led by wildly misnamed pressure group Free Press [Barbara Joanna Lucas, Capital Research Center]
  • In lawsuits against Yelp arising from bad reviews, courts have not been impressed by theory that the service extorts reviewed businesses [Paul Alan Levy; a restaurateur upset at Yelp strikes back in a different way]
  • Proposal to make scientific misconduct a crime “would seem to raise serious First Amendment problems” [Howard Wasserman]

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2 Comments

  • Whatever else one might dislike Eric Holder’s record for, mainstream Republicans are in no position to condemn him as
    “the worst Attorney General on press freedom issues in a generation, possibly since Richard Nixon’s John Mitchell.”
    The cases adduced by Trevor Timm are national-security leaks, which Republicans also opposed. If there are more prosecutions today, it most likely reflects the increased opportunities to leak on the Internet.

  • A large percentage of scientific misconduct is already subject criminal penalties. Misconduct in research supported by federal funds has been prosecuted as mail fraud.