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The disdain law students and their administrators show the First Amendment and differing viewpoints should be a major societal concern.

Earlier this month, federal circuit court Judge Kyle Duncan appeared at Stanford Law School to give a speech. He came at the invitation of the Federalist Society. His talk was titled, The Fifth Circuit in Conversation with the Supreme Court: Covid, Guns, and Twitter. Such gatherings are one of the benefits of attending an elite law school.

Instead, what took place would have gotten a preschooler sent home for the day. Many Standard law students were angry that Judge Duncan was coming, because he is gasp! a traditional conservative. Some held up profane signs in the room where he was speaking. As he began his lecture, many students shouted and heckled him with taunts such as scumbag and youre a liar.

This is wildly inappropriate, but it has become the norm from the tolerant left.

Ironically, Stanford claims to have a strong free speech policy. It is a violation to prevent or disrupt the effective carrying out of a University function or approved activity, such as lectures and public events.

But the words on a page dont mean much if those in charge wont enforce them. After numerous disruptions, Judge Duncan noted that the prisoners were now running the asylum. An apt description. He asked the school administration to calm the students. Up came Tirien Steinbach, associate dean for diversity, equity and inclusion. Instead of bringing the students into line, she verbally attacked the federal judge.

This event is tearing at the fabric of this community that I care about and am here to support, she said. She smeared his speech as abhorrent and harmful. She claimed it literally denies the humanity of people.

There a deep irony in a mob of screaming zealots claiming that allowing a lone federal judge to deliver an address is harmful.

Stanfords president and dean have since apologized, but, without disciplining the offending students and Ms. Steinbach, it wont mean much. Instead, what the lawyers of tomorrow are learning is that might makes right. The students have a right to protest, of course. But they dont have a right to essentially vandalize campus events on public property. Instead, they learn that minority voices can be bullied and silenced by majority power. That the words on a page whether they be Stanfords free speech policy or the First Amendment can be ignored at their convenience.

Its deeply troubling that the lawyers of tomorrow appear more interested in exercising tyrannical authority than respecting diverse viewpoints and individual rights.

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EDITORIAL: Law students shout down the First Amendment - Las Vegas Review-Journal

A lawsuit filed in federal court Friday aims to declare the anti-dark money ballot measure that Arizona voters approved last year unconstitutional on grounds that political donors have a First Amendment right to do so anonymously, among other claims.

Voters widely approved Proposition 211 last year, with more than 70% of voters choosing to require that big-money donors disclose their names to political action committees. The Voters Right to Know Act triggers disclosure if an individual gives $5,000 or more to a committee that spent at least $50,000 on a given statewide or legislative race or ballot proposition.

On local elections, the disclosure rate drops to $2,500 for individuals and $25,000 for committee spending.

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The lawsuit filed in federal court in Phoenix on Friday by the conservative advocacy group Americans for Prosperity and its foundation says that such disclosures have a chilling effect on the free speech of Arizonans and are a violation of the First Amendment.

The First Amendment safeguards the right of individuals to donate to private advocacy organizations of their choosing without undue risk that they will be subjected to their identities being disclosed or other chilling by the government, the lawsuit says. The lawsuit is similar to one filed in state court last year by the Center for Arizona Policy and the Arizona Free Enterprise Club.

At the heart of the lawsuit is the argument that anonymous political speech is protected by the First Amendment. Terry Goddard, a former Arizona attorney general and the driving force behind the Voters Right to Know Act, said the arguments against disclosure arent new and have been rejected by courts.

I think the arguments they make have been thoroughly dealt with, Goddard told the Arizona Mirror.

The group behind the suit, Americans for Prosperity, is no stranger to dark money.

Dark money refers to political nonprofits that spend money on political ads, robocalls and other efforts to sway elections without any requirement to disclose donors.

During the 2014 midterm elections, the group was one of the largest spenders on political ads and due to its nonprofit status, did not have to disclose the source of its donors. It continues to play a key-role in major conservative causes.

The term garnered extra attention after the United States Supreme Court ruled on the case of Citizens United v. FEC which prohibited the government from restricting independent expenditures that are commonly associated with dark money from political campaigns by corporations, nonprofits, labor unions and other groups.

Since the SCOTUS ruling, groups like End Citizens United have sought to rein in anonymous spending in elections by large corporations and donors which they see as a way to influence policy making that unfairly overpowers the average voter.

Without that transparency it is easier for them to raise big chunks of money from millionaires and companies that want to buy influence from politicians in Washington, Adam Bozzi, spokesman for End Citizens United, a political action committee that is working to reverse the SCOTUS decision. They want to do that without any scrutiny.

Bozzi pointed out that former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia even favored transparent disclosure and former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in the Citizens United ruling that, while the First Amendment protects political speech, transparent disclosure allows citizens to react to that speech.

But not everyone sees it that way.

Compliance-wise, it is just a nightmare, Luke Wachob, senior director of communications and policy for People United for Privacy Foundation told the Mirror about Prop. 211.

According to the lawsuit and Wachob, the voter-approved law will make it so those who advocate at the Capitol will also be running afoul of disclosure laws due to the overly broad language of the proposition.

The argument rests on the claim that the proposition does not adequately define campaign media spending, leaving an open door to interpretation, and adds on the window of time prior to an election in which disclosures must be made and other forms of political speech may be impacted.

It is going to trip up a lot of legislative groups looking to talk about legislation around the legislative session, Wachob said.

Plaintiffs and advocates for anonymous political spending say that the disclosure required by Prop. 211 opens up donors to harassment.

People vote in private booths, Wachob said. It is a very similar idea, that when you support a nonprofit group or advocacy groupyou should not have to have your name, address, employer published.

In todays divisive political environment, Wachob contends that exposing donors could create retaliation or chill speech, as donors would think twice about donating out of fear. There is some established case law to support this as in 2015, then California Attorney General Kamala Harris was blocked in federal court from receiving the donor list of Americans for Prosperity.

People United for Privacy, the group Wachob represents, is funded in part by groups that also fund Americans for Prosperity and has rallied against dark money disclosure in other states where Americans for Prosperity has also done work.

Let me not be cavalier, they started the wheels rolling in the district court, Goddard said, when asked by the Mirror if he thought a SCOTUS challenge was inevitable. Goddard added that they followed SCOTUS precedents in drafting Prop. 211 and that he believes strongly that the voter-approved measure is constitutional.

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Claiming a First Amendment right to anonymity, lawsuit aims to strike ... - Arizona Mirror

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As previously disclosed in Canopy Growth (NASDAQ: CGC) Current Report on Form 8-K filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (the SEC) on October 26, 2022, the Company entered into an arrangement agreement (the Floating Share Arrangement Agreement) with Canopy USA, LLC (Canopy USA) and Acreage Holdings, Inc. (Acreage), pursuant to which, subject to the terms and conditions of the Floating Share Arrangement Agreement, including all closing conditions contained in the arrangement agreement between the Company and Acreage dated April 18, 2019, as amended on May 15, 2019, September 23, 2020 and November 17, 2020 (the Existing Arrangement Agreement), Canopy USA will acquire all of the issued and outstanding Class D subordinate voting shares of Acreage (the Floating Shares) by way of a court-approved plan of arrangement under the Business Corporations Act (British Columbia) (the BCBCA) at a fixed exchange ratio of 0.45 of a common share of Canopy Growth for each Floating Share held (the Floating Share Arrangement).

On March 17, 2023, the Company, Canopy USA and Acreage entered into a first amendment to the Floating Share Arrangement Agreement (the Amendment). Pursuant to the terms of the Amendment, the Company, Canopy USA, and Acreage agreed to amend the Exercise Outside Date (as defined in the Floating Share Arrangement Agreement) from March 31, 2023 to May 31, 2023. The completion of the Floating Share Arrangement is subject to satisfaction or, if permitted, waiver of certain closing conditions, including, among others, completion of the Canopy Capital Reorganization (as defined in the Floating Share Arrangement Agreement) on or prior to the Exercise Outside Date. There can be no certainty, nor can the Company provide any assurance, that all conditions precedent contained in the Floating Share Arrangement Agreement and the Existing Arrangement Agreement will be satisfied or waived, which may result in the acquisition of Acreage not being completed.

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Canopy Growth (CGC) Enters First Amendment to the Floating ... - StreetInsider.com

(The Center Square) Associated Builders and Contractors of Michigan, a statewide trade association, is suing the National Labor Relations Board general counsel over allegedly threatening to violate employer free-speech rights.

The lawsuit says that Jennifer Abruzzo, NLRB general counsel and prosecutor, would abrogate employer First Amendment rights by using her authority to change longstanding precedent to favor unions.

The Chicago-based nonprofit Liberty Justice Center filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Michigan on March 16, 2023, on behalf of ABC.

After Abruzzo was appointed by President Biden on July 21, 2021, she issued a public memorandum announcing that she would urge the Board to correct its longstanding precedent that allowed business owners to speak to their employees about unionization.

The lawsuit says Abruzzo has embarked on a personal campaign to transform federal labor law under the National Labor Relations Act to favor unions, and to disfavor employers.

A Bloomberg article says Abruzzo targeted 53 issues for changes in precedent in a memorandum after winning Senate confirmation.

The lawsuit says Abruzzos public threat of prosecution violates the First Amendment Free Speech Clause, which prohibits government officials from making threats intended as a censorship scheme to quell speech.

As general counsel, Abruzzo is authorized to impartially investigate and prosecute once a charge is filed. Shes not authorized to file a charge alleging an unfair labor practice against an employer or a union.

The lawsuit claims that Abruzzos memo is an attempt to coerce employers into avoiding conversations on union representation with their employees by threatening legal action if these discussions take place during mandatory meetings. So now employers must refrain from discussing their opinions on unions with their own employees in these settings if they wish to avoid legal consequences.

Every single day 88% of Michigans builders and contractors go to work employing over 75,000 skilled trades workers and their families, CEO and President of ABC Michigan Jimmy Greene said in a statement. Working in a competitive environment means that we depend on a fair and non-biased National Labor Relations Board. To date, ABC Michigan sees little to nothing that would give our members confidence in that expectation.

The First Amendment protects the right of unions, workers, and business owners to discuss the pros and cons of unionizing workers at a business. A union has a right to argue its case for unionizing to a businesses employees, employees have the right to discuss it among themselves, and their employer has the right to tell employees why a union might not be beneficial.

Courts have made it clear that when a government officials speech is not an attempt to convince but an attempt to coerce, then that official has crossed the line into threatening behavior, LJC senior attorney Buck Dougherty said in a statement. And the Supreme Court held many years ago in its Bantam Books decision that a threat of prosecution designed as a censorship scheme violates the First Amendment.

The NLRB declined to comment.

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Trade association sues labor board prosecutor over alleged First Amendment violations - The Center Square

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Private communications made public in a defamation lawsuit against Fox News revealed some of the networks top stars and executives acknowledging baseless conspiracy theories surrounding the 2020 presidential election.

The $1.6bn lawsuit from Dominion Voting Systems, the company at the centre of bogus on-air statements from Donald Trumps allies, argues that the right-wing media network knowingly presented false claims that energised competing networks that threatened Fox viewership.

Private admissions detailed in court filings show text messages, emails and sworn testimony questioning or ridiculing unreliable guests and spurious arguments while at the same time conceding that publicly rejecting those claims would risk alienating their viewers.

Embarrassing and potentially reputation-damaging behind-the-scenes revelations, stitched together in Dominions sprawling case alleging a media empire that relies on lying to its audience, may be compelling evidence, but they are not necessarily enough to reach the high bar in a billion-dollar defamation case, according to legal analysts.

Those findings will be enormously helpful for a jury to consider Dominions case if a trial begins as scheduled in April. But prevailing in court means Dominion must prove that Fox aired defamatory statements knowing that they were false or with reckless disregard for the truth, and link those accusations to the states of mind of those responsible for airing them.

Those hurdles are outlined in the US Supreme Court precedent established in The New York Times v Sullivan, a landmark press freedom case from 1964 that has also been at the centre of right-wing attacks on the media, including recent lawsuits from Sarah Palin and Donald Trump.

Some analysts argue that Dominions case against the most-watched cable media outlet could deliver a blow to press freedom protections while, ironically, powerful right-wing figures launch their own legal challenges to strip the Sullivan precedent entirely.

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A spokesperson for Fox News told The Independent that Dominion joins a long line of public figures and corporations across the country that have long tried to silence the press, and this lawsuit from Staple Street Capital-owned Dominion is nothing more than another flagrant attack on the First Amendment.

Fox News will continue to fiercely protect the free press as a ruling in favor of Dominion would have grave consequences for journalism across this country, the statement said.

In another twist of fate, Dominions case literally involves the levers of democracy, things that we should be very wary about punishing, according to Andrew Geronimo, director of the First Amendment Clinic within the Milton and Charlotte Kramer Law Clinic at Case Western Reserve University School of Law.

We want to encourage a robust and wide-open discussion about public affairs, especially about how to run our governments, and we want to allow for some breathing room to let people talk about this without having to do the full journalistic run at it, he told The Independent.

But what you cant do is knowingly lie about somebody in a way that damages them, he said.

Dominion submitted dozens of pages outlining the considerations needed to meet the actual malice standard, including statements and messages from the networks on-air personalities, producers and executive leadership, as well as Fox Corporation chairman Rupert Murdochs admission in a sworn deposition that some of his stars were endorsing a false narrative around the 2020 election.

Attorneys for Fox News argue that Dominion has sought to distract from its evidentiary deficiencies by cherrypicking anything it can find from any corner of the Fox News organisation that shows that anyone at Fox News doubted or disbelieved the presidents allegations.

From there, it posits that Fox writ large not the specific person(s) at Fox News responsible for each statement knew that that specific statement was false, according to court filings from Fox News.

In addition to uncovered messages and admissions in sworn testimony, Dominions case has relied on showing a much-larger picture of the Fox organisation, its decision making, and its concerns over declining viewership with competition from other right-wing networks that have indulged the former presidents conspiracy theories.

That is the media story narrative driving Dominions case, so you dont get the plausible deniability of were just putting newsworthy stuff on air, which is the argument [Fox] is making, Mr Geronimo said.

In legal briefs, attorneys for Fox News have argued that news organisations have an obligation to air newsworthy allegations, especially those from a sitting president. But those claims are likely to dissolve if the network was driven by profit rather than facts, according to legal analysts.

The fact that there was arguably a motive by Fox to publish these accusations against Dominion based on its own economic interests in retaining Trump viewers would, if believed by the jury, probably destroy that argument, Rutgers University law professor Ronald Chen told NPR.

Attorneys for Fox News have argued that Dominion was not damaged anywhere close to the $1.6bn the voting machine company is seeking.

But if there are boards of elections around the country canceling contracts with Dominion and citing some of this reporting that turns out to be false, I think that is a way to show damages, Mr Geronimo said.

I think what a trial really should do in this case is go through statement by statement, and figure which of them are statements of fact, and if they are statements of fact, which of them are false, he told The Independent. And if theyre false, which of them damaged Dominion? I think there should be a pretty granular and specific analysis of what was said, who knew what and when, and only if all those boxes are checked should there be some kind of liability.

Richard Tofel, former president of nonprofit investigative news publisher ProPublica, argued that the parties should settle. For Dominion, that means reaching a conclusion long before a potentially lengthy trial, conviction and sentencing that could take months or years to enforce.

Dominion has proved the hardest part of its case, that Fox not only repeatedly broadcast untruths in the days and weeks after the election, but that it did so knowingly, and for the base motive of pandering to viewers, especially as some defected to rival networks, and thus preserving profits, he wrote.

Fox, on the other hand, could settle to avoid a potentially even-larger trial verdict amount, and, perhaps more importantly to its business, the network would avoid having to publicly and repeatedly admit a series of truths that, as court filings have revealed, could damage the business and crash viewership.

A settlement scenario would not necessarily be an admission of guilt but could include an agreement that Fox News agrees to say those things we got sued over, he said.

I dont think a settlement would change how Fox does business really in any way, he told The Independent. This whole incident might make them a little bit more cautious.

Rupert Murdoch (REUTERS)

Tim Heaphy, a former federal prosecutor and the lead investigator for the House select committee investigating January 6, said that the legal system in this case reveals its function as a forum in which people can address grievances and get justice, and there is an important sort of public discourse benefit, because a lot of that plays out in a public way.

He suggested that Dominion may not want to settle exactly for that reason.

They want a lot of these facts to be laid bare in a courtroom in a public proceeding, he told MSNBC. Were headed there. There may be more of these kinds of behind-the-scenes allegations, and I do think that theres a useful long-term benefit for people to understand.

A victory for Dominion at a trial could be a devastating blow to Fox. Longtime First Amendment attorney Lee Levine told The Los Angeles Times: I have a hard time envisioning a scenario in which Fox wins before a jury.

But some legal analysts fear that elevated scrutiny into a media outlet on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars in damages or more, if a jury decides could cause long-term harm to US newsrooms.

Generally speaking, it is not a good idea to permit a wholesale inquiry into newsroom decisions as a whole, and also I include ownership as part of that inquiry, according to James Goodale, the New York Times general counsel who advised the paper to publish the Pentagon Papers, speaking to NPR.

No matter how much I might personally deplore what Fox is alleged to have done, I worry a lot more about the longer term-ramifications, according to Jane Kirtley, University of Minnesota media law professor and a former executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, speaking to NPR.

To simply say Fox is a bunch of liars that they shouldnt be allowed to get away with this and their wild speculations should not be reported and should not be protected I just think that that is a slippery slope, she told the outlet.

But the problem is that by lifting the veil on the editorial decision-making process, we are now going to see all news organizations called into question going forward, she added.

Fox has argued similarly in statements to the press; a spokesperson told The Independent that the case presents an unprecedented assault on the First Amendment.

But even if Dominion makes their case and convinces a jury to shovel truckloads of Foxs money to [Dominion], nothing in this case presents a meaningful threat to the First Amendment, according to former Bloomberg counsel and New York University professor Charles Glasser, speaking to NPR.

It really comes down to the facts about how the story was crafted and disseminated, he added.

Mr Geronimo told The Independent that a jury, in the end, might just not like you.

And if they dont like you, then they might be inclined to fight against you, he said.

I dont think we want people just picking sides and apportioning liability there, because then what, when the sides are flipped? he added. Thats a dynamic that I will be watching if it goes to trial: Are they doing what I think the analysis requires, which is finding specific statements, and checking off the elements? Or is it all just like, Look how bad Fox was? and not be as specific with which statement was a false statement of fact.

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Will Fox News settle the Dominion defamation lawsuit? First Amendment experts arent so sure - Yahoo News