The Transformation of Statutes into Constitutional Law: How Early Post Office Policy Shaped Modern First Amendment Doctrine

New communication technologies often have been accompanied by utopian dreams of a society unencumbered by ignorance, inequality, and poverty. However, the American Post Office-a medium of communication that, like the Internet, developed through a substantial amount of governmental policy-served as a very real vehicle for a transformation in American constitutional law. Early American policymakers gave the Post Office specific attributes that helped established the Post Office as a First Amendment institution, an institution whose role judges recognized as furthering First Amendment values in unique ways

Attacking Brandenburg with History: Does the Long-Term Harm of Biased Speech Justify a Criminal Statute Suppressing It?

Book Review: Destructive Messages: How Hate Speech Paves the Way for Harmful Social Movements, Alexander Tsesis, New York: New York University Press, 2002, 246 pages. A review of Alexander Tsesis\u27s Destructive Messages: How Hate Speech Paves the Way for Harmful Social Movements, New York University Press, 2002. At one level, Alexander Tsesis\u27s thesis is simply one in a long line of arguments about the need to regulate racist speech. Yet on another level, it is fundamentally different from much American literature on hate speech because Tsesis draws on a broad historical swath, and because he contends that the United States should regulate hate speech due to a causal link between that speech and oppression of such magnitude as the Holocaust and slavery. Moreover, it is fundamentally different because Tsesis focuses on the ideology of racial inferiority and not where most proponents of regulating hate speech in the past have set their sights-epithets, or what one could term verbal assaults. At the end of his book, Tsesis proposes a model statute for criminalizing hate speech

Attacking Brandenburg with History: Does the Long-Term Harm of Biased Speech Justify a Criminal Statute Suppressing It?

Book Review: Destructive Messages: How Hate Speech Paves the Way for Harmful Social Movements, Alexander Tsesis, New York: New York University Press, 2002, 246 pages. A review of Alexander Tsesis\u27s Destructive Messages: How Hate Speech Paves the Way for Harmful Social Movements, New York University Press, 2002. At one level, Alexander Tsesis\u27s thesis is simply one in a long line of arguments about the need to regulate racist speech. Yet on another level, it is fundamentally different from much American literature on hate speech because Tsesis draws on a broad historical swath, and because he contends that the United States should regulate hate speech due to a causal link between that speech and oppression of such magnitude as the Holocaust and slavery. Moreover, it is fundamentally different because Tsesis focuses on the ideology of racial inferiority and not where most proponents of regulating hate speech in the past have set their sights-epithets, or what one could term verbal assaults. At the end of his book, Tsesis proposes a model statute for criminalizing hate speech

Text is Not Enough

In Bostock v. Clayton County, the Supreme Court held that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 protects gay and lesbian individuals from employment discrimination. The three opinions in the case also provided a feast for Court watchers who study statutory interpretation. Commentators across the ideological spectrum have described the opinions as dueling examples of textualism. The conventional wisdom is thus that Bostock shows the triumph of textualism. The conventional wisdom is wrong. Instead, Bostock shows what those who have studied statutory interpretation have known for decades: judges are multimodalists, drawing from a panoply of forms of legal argumentation. In particular, Bostock shows that judges are inevitably common-law thinkers, even when interpreting statutes