Latest in First Amendment
A federal appeals court ruled that a state statute requiring government contractors to pledge not to boycott Israel violates the First Amendment. What’s in the decision?
In a new Wall Street Journal op-ed, Philip Hamburger argues that “the government, in working through private companies, is abridging the freedom of speech.” This argument doesn’t hold water.
How the presidentially appointed CEO of the federal media agency hijacked his agency for the president’s political purposes.
The First Amendment is a public endeavor—not a mandate for big tech to redefine free speech in America.
The secretary of state has accidentally shed light on the burdensome restrictions that the State Department puts on its overseas employees and their families.
The Ninth Circuit declined to rehear en banc a case concerning the application of the state secrets privilege. What were the various claims made in the case?
Judge Royce Lamberth of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia denied the government's motion for a temporary restraining order to block distribution of the new memoir by former national security advisor John Bolton. Though Judge Lamberth ruled that "Bolton’s unilateral conduct raises grave national security concerns," he found that "the horse is out of the barn" regarding Bolton's memoir—which will be published on June 23—and wrote that, "For reasons that hardly need to be stated, the Court will not order a nationwide seizure and destruction of a political memoir."
After suing former national security advisor John Bolton for his alleged breach of nondisclosure agreements related to the publication of his book, "The Room Where it Happens," the Trump administration has filed for a temporary restraining order against the book's release. The application is available here and below.
Last week, a controversy in the National Basketball Association (NBA) ignited widespread public conversation about the perils of doing business in China. In a now-deleted post, Daryl Morey, who is the general manager of the Houston Rockets, tweeted a picture of an image that said “fight for freedom, stand with Hong Kong.” The Rockets’s owner pushed back, tweeting that Morey “does not speak for” Houston’s team.
The “techlash” of the past few years represents a moment of quasi-constitutional upheaval for the internet. The way a few private companies have been “governing” large parts of the digital world has suffered a crisis of legitimacy. Calls to find mechanisms to limit the arbitrary exercise of power online have gained new urgency. This task of “digital constitutionalism” is one of the great projects of the coming decades. It is especially pressing in the context of content moderation – platforms’ practice of designing and enforcing rules for what they allow to be posted on their services.