Tuesday, November 9, 2021

‘Stay calm and be pleasant’ / ‘I’m going to kill you’ / ‘Educational gag orders’

‘Stay calm and be pleasant.’ That’s counsel from the state of Michigan to almost 50,000 government employees as they encounter a rising tide of “First Amendment auditors”—citizens recording video in and around public buildings.
Reason: The Supreme Court Declines To Determine if You Have a First Amendment Right To Film the Police.”
New York University’s First Amendment Watch offers a guide to teaching the rights and limitations of recording audio and video of police.

‘Priscilla Villarreal was put in jail for asking a police officer a question.’ A federal appeals court has revived a lawsuit filed by a journalist who operates entirely on Facebook—a woman challenging her 2017 arrest under a law a judge later found unconstitutional.
She’s working with Starz on a TV series.
A panel of Chicago-area journalists and educators convenes next Wednesday, Nov. 17, for a free online forum exploring “the threat to local journalism—and democracy.”

‘I’m going to kill you.’ That was just one of the threatening messages sent from a man in jail to his sister—a man whose First Amendment challenge to his cyberstalking conviction has been rejected by a Washington appeals court.
A Wisconsin appeals court has reversed the conviction of a man whose social media posts—of his movie ticket, but also of bullets and a loaded magazine—prompted his arrest at the theater on disorderly conduct charges.

‘Sen. Warren … betrayed our fundamental right to free speech.’ A lawsuit filed against Elizabeth Warren by the authors and publisher of a book critical of the U.S. response to the pandemic accuses her of violating the First Amendment when she encouraged Amazon to stop peddling their work.
The FDA sent one of the authors a warning letter in February, directing him to “cease the sale of … unapproved and unauthorized products for the mitigation, prevention, treatment, diagnosis, or cure of COVID-19.”
An employment lawyer weighs the question of whether vaccination opposition merits First Amendment protection.

On campus …

‘Educational gag orders.’ A report from the human rights group PEN America says bans on the teaching of critical race theory threaten First Amendment rights.
An Oregon teachers union is going to court against school board limits on images and signs employees can display on campus—a policy that began as a ban on displays of support for Black Lives Matter and LGBTQ Pride.
Reversing a decision condemned by free-speech experts, the University of Florida now says it’ll let three professors testify in a suit challenging a new law that critics say limits voting rights.
The New Republic says a Texas political spat has dragged the Supreme Court into a First Amendment dilemma: “When can school boards … discipline their own members?”
The conservative group Moms for Liberty is suing a Florida school board over a public-participation policy that it says limits the presentation of opposing viewpoints.