Mar 3, 2021 Edward RubinConstitutional Law
Toni Massaro & Helen Norton,
Free Speech and Democracy: A Primer for 21st Century Reformers (Dec. 15, 2020), available on
SSRN.
There has been a long-standing belief that more speech produces more freedom, and that a governmental regime is democratic to the extent that governmental control of speech is minimized. Recent developments have called these beliefs into question, however. Justice Brandeis may have said that sunlight is the best of disinfectants, but Donald Trump has given disinfectants a bad name, and cast doubt as well on their metaphorical referents through his unceasing falsehoods and his flirtation with or embrace of Russian internet disinformation. He is out of office, but his shenanigans are in fact examples of much more extensive dilemma that remains with us today. In a recent article I like lots, Toni Massaro and Helen Norton confront this dilemma and offer possible responses.
The problem, as the authors note, is that speech has been weaponized by a toxic mixture of new technology and extreme partisanship. The internet in particular, as a source of information that people increasingly rely upon, is less a marketplace of ideas and more a means of inducing people to buy into defective reports and harmful attitudes, by overwhelming them with input or misleading them with subliminal messages. Instead of addressing this problem, a conservative Supreme Court has weaponized free speech doctrine by treating government efforts to regulate defective products and harmful substances as an intrusion on the free speech rights of those who sell these products and substances in the actual marketplace. By thus overlooking serious threats to speech and instituting counter-productive protections, the Court has created a serious mismatch between real dangers and existing doctrine. Continue reading "Protecting Free Speech from Itself"
Mar 2, 2021 Asanga WelikalaInternational & Comparative Law
The Brexit referendum result in June 2016 brought to the boil a cauldron of constitutional politics that had been simmering since the piecemeal New Labour reforms of the 1990s. Those reforms were undertaken as a programme of constitutional modernisation in improving the legal protection of individual rights and in establishing asymmetric devolved institutions at the peripheries of the Union. Despite some radical rhetoric at the time, it was, in both style and substance, a very British kind of reform – incremental, pragmatic, careful to preserve a cherished narrative of historical continuity, and dismissive of theoretical grand designs. They were meant to be practical solutions to practical problems, which would enable the constitution to change sufficiently in order to carry on as successfully as ever before.
Except that this was not how it turned out. The changes to the regime of rights protection turned out to be, for some at least, a cultural revolution through the judicialisation of politics. The institutionalisation of democratically elected loci of popular sovereignty at the sub-state level turned out to be difficult to reconcile with the principle of the legislative supremacy of the Crown-in-Parliament upon which the rest of the unwritten constitution still rested. The judicialisation of rights protection and multilevel governance were both reforms that presumed UK membership in the European Union in perpetuity. When Leave won the Brexit referendum largely through English votes and against majorities for Remain in Scotland and Northern Ireland, these debates and especially the question of the UK’s continued territorial integrity have become engulfed in flames of passionate rhetoric and deep divisions. All of a sudden, the UK constitutional settlement finds itself in a very un-British place. Continue reading "The Constitutional Codification Debate in the United Kingdom"
Mar 1, 2021 Ruqaiijah YearbyHealth Law
Lindsay F. Wiley,
Democratizing the Law of Social Distancing, 20
Yale J. of Health Policy, L. & Ethics __ (2020), available at
SSRN.
Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, U.S. emergency preparedness laws and plans to prevent, detect, manage, and contain the spread of communicable disease targeted individual actions, rather than community mitigation efforts. For example, the Model State Emergency Health Powers Act and state emergency preparedness laws concentrated on detecting, managing, and containing the spread of an infectious disease, in part, through the medical examination, testing, isolation, and quarantine of individuals. This began to change when Congress amended the Public Health Service Act in 2002 to provide states with financial support and strategies to prepare for and respond to public health emergencies. By 2004, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention began to use the term social distancing as a way to describe a strategy to stop the community spread of disease.
Yet, as Professor Lindsay Wiley discusses in Democratizing the Law of Social Distancing, social distancing was not widely implemented as a community containment strategy until the COVID-19 pandemic. Many states have begun to incorporate community mitigation efforts, such as stay-at-home/lockdown, mask, and social distancing orders, into emergency preparedness laws and plans to contain the community spread of COVID-19. These efforts have resulted in slowing the spread of COVID-19 in most communities. However, not only have the laws met with resistance from the public and the courts, but also these community mitigation efforts have not been effective in slowing the spread of COIVD-19 in racial and ethnic minority communities. Continue reading "Democratizing, Protecting, and Supporting Communities: Improving the Government’s Pandemic Response"
