Flag
Burning
In 1984 a member of the Revolutionary
Communist Youth Brigade, Gregory Johnson, torched an American
flag outside the Republican Convention in Dallas. His act
was part of a demonstration to protest foreign policies of
President Reagan's administration. Little did Johnson know,
however, that he also would be igniting a long and emotional
debate in Congress and around the nation — a debate pitting
the sanctity of a national symbol against an individual's
right to free expression.
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Campus Speech Codes
Dating back to the 1980s, hundreds
of public colleges and universities have adopted speech codes
that aim to ensure a civil, nondiscriminatory environment
on campus. The goal is noble. The problem with such codes,
however, is their tendency to inhibit protected expression.
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Liquor Advertising
Generally speaking, as the decades
pass our courts and legislatures find more and more ways to
carve exceptions out of the First Amendment. Commercial advertising
is essentially the reverse. Way back in 1942 the Supreme Court
pronounced that commercial advertising is a form of expression
unprotected by the Constitution. But as the decades passed,
the Court backtracked and interpreted the First Amendment
to afford truthful advertising greater and greater degrees
of protection.
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P2P File Sharing
Since the late 1990s one of the nation's most intense legal
battles has focused on so-called "peer-to-peer"
— or "P2P" — digital file sharing over
the Internet. Napster and dozens of like businesses distributed
software that allowed individual computer users to search
other users' computers for specified digital content and then
to download that content — without paying. The technology
is a tremendous tool for sharing information. The problem,
however, was that the files most often "shared"
were copyrighted music and video.
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"Indecent" Broadcasts
First-Amendment rules for broadcast are different
than for other media. That's because the broadcast spectrum
is considered a scarce resource that must be regulated to
ensure an orderly, effective means of communication. This
governmental foot in the door has led not only to assigning
broadcast frequencies but also to content regulation. So while
the very narrow class of material called "obscenity"
can be outlawed in any medium, only in broadcast can the more
broadly defined "indecency" be prohibited. This
is done mainly under the rationale of protecting children.
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Sex on the Internet
Nothing in the field of cyberspace law has generated more
emotion than efforts to curb sexually explicit material on
the Internet. The prevalence of often- raunchy, sex-oriented
sites and cyber-advertising has outraged many, who view it
as a pornography invasion into homes and an enticement to
children. For others, it is the effort to censor that infuriates;
they see Internet regulation as the oppressive hand of government
in an otherwise pristine frontier of wide-open speech.
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Nude Dancing
Entertainment in its many forms, such
as motion pictures, plays and dance performances, is expression
protected by the First Amendment. Yet the Supreme Court has
ventured down the muddled path of declaring some kinds of
entertainment less protected than others. This is true with
nude or topless dancing.
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Violent Video Games
One of the great enigmas of U.S. culture
is that for more than a century so much politicking and legal
contorting has occurred to suppress sexual expression while
extremely violent expression has been much more broadly accepted.
In recent years efforts have grown to shield children from
graphically violent entertainment, and an April 2007 FCC report
urged that TV violence be curtailed much like sexual "indecency."
But there is no developed constitutional principle to allow
for government control of violent expression. This has been
illustrated by the many unsuccessful efforts to restrict violent
video games.
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