Monthly Archives: February 2012

27-02-2012 19:37 Glenn discusses the Jeremy Lin controversy and the state of freedom of speech and capitalism in America web.gbtv.com

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GBTV: "Jellyfish Capitalism" and Free Speech PART 2 - Video

27-02-2012 21:38 atlah.org Recorded on 23 February 2012. Free speech in America is being taken away.

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Give Me Free Speech - Video

Summary: WKU has been accused of censorship and limiting free speech after fighting satirical and negative comments about the university on Twitter.

Western Kentucky University has beencriticized for censoring behaviour after fighting fiercely against negative comments and parodies of the institution on social networking sites, including Facebook and Twitter.

In recent months, the academic institution has begun monitoring and fighting against satirical commentary and student criticism of the universitys officials and WKU itself which appears online.

Fighting the social media activity, Western Kentucky University has taken steps that have raised outcry by students and advocates, who claim it is a violation of free speech rights and that the moves were made in order to censor students.

Gary Ransdell, the WKU president wrote this message on the universitys Facebook wall:

Normally I post Facebook updates when interesting and cool things are happening with me or with WKU. This message, however, is aimed at everyone who uses Facebook or other social media, especially students and others who are building resumes. We, at WKU, have become particularly conscious lately of some who are misusing social media and using some poor judgment. So my message here is Be smart.

Use social media thoughtfully; always remember what you send is permanent and can be viewed years from now. Employers do their homework. They can and will track ways in which prospective employees have used social media. We, at WKU, track such things as well. Be smart and remember the Golden Rule. It applies as much to the use of social media as it does to how we conduct our daily lives. Think twice before you hit the post button or send key. Be smart, Hilltoppers!

It is reported that this may have been in response to a fake Gary Ransdell Twitter account (@PimpRansdell) that at the universitys insistence was closed down briefly by Twitter for several weeks this year before becoming reinstated.

Is this friendly, sensible advice, or a veiled warning against students thinking of satirizing him or the institution he represents?

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University battles Twitter parodies, strangles free speech?

According to free speech experts, censorship has spread in schools and colleges throughout the United States in recent years.

In 2011, the Minnesota State Supreme Court ruled in favor of the University of Minnesota to reprimand the off-campus speech of student Amanda Tatro for comments made on Facebook.

The court indicated this ruling was not due to the nature of the comments but their effect on the university's curriculum. Therefore, it became possible for the university to control a student's off-campus speech when it affected the reputation of the school.

"To the extent a decision is made regarding curriculum, the school should be able to make it," Missouri Press Association consultant Jean Maneke said. "To the extent a publication exists as public forum, there needs to be tolerance for free speech."

Tatro's Facebook comments focused on taking out her aggression in a science-mortuary class on a cadaver she named Bernie. Another student found the posts offensive and turned them over to the university. Families that donated cadavers called in concerns to the university, and Tatro was briefly expelled from class while police investigated her Facebook threats to stab an ex-boyfriend with medical equipment.

Tatro was venting in an off-campus forum thought to be outside the university's reach. Due to a lack of precedent for this case, the courts looked to the 1988 Missouri case Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier involving high school students.

Before Hazelwood, the Supreme Court gave primary education students the benefit of free speech as long as it was not disruptive to the school environment. Hazelwood increased the level of censorship to control any action that caused "legitimate concern related to individual rights, safety or distractions to the school environment."

The Hazelwood decision allowed school officials to censor clothing, speech and even hair color. The 6th Circuit Court also recently applied the Hazelwood decision to permit a university to discipline off-campus speech it said affected school relations in the 2011 Minnesota v. Tatro case.

"The First Amendment document called this the chilling effect," said Charles Davis, University of Missouri's facilitator of the Media of the Future Initiative for Mizzou Advantage. "It makes people think twice about what they are saying."

A representative of the Student Press Law Center agreed that university students should not be judged on the same standard as high school students.

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censorship laws become an important issue in schools and universities

26-02-2012 23:16 staff.tumblr.com Voice your opinions: policy@tumblr.com

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What's Happening to Free Speech? - Video

SOUTH HADLEY, Mass.—A Massachusetts man has settled a federal lawsuit that claimed his free speech rights were violated when he was removed from a public meeting where he criticized school officials' handling of the case of a 15-year-old girl who committed suicide after allegedly being bullied by other high school students.

An attorney for Luke Gelinas (guh-LEE'-nuss) of South Hadley announced the $75,000 settlement Monday. Gelinas sued in 2010, saying he was improperly ejected from a South Hadley school committee meeting when he criticized officials for the death of Irish immigrant Phoebe Prince, which gained international attention.

The lawsuit named Edward Boisselle, then school committee chairman, and two police officers.

Gelinas said in a statement Monday his lawsuit was about "social justice, which has been served."

Messages were left Monday for Boisselle and the town's attorney.

© Copyright 2012 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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Free speech suit settled in school bullying case

Government employees who get into trouble for disobeying a superior’s plea to file a report that the employee thinks is false and believes will contribute to covering up misconduct will get no legal guidance on their plight from the Supreme Court, even though lower courts are in dispute over how to decide that issue.  Without comment, the Court on Monday denied review in two new cases, raising that First Amendment free-speech question from opposite sides.

The Court had been asked, in separate cases from New York and Washington, D.C.,  to further clarify its decision five years ago in Garcetti v. Ceballos, denying First Amendment protection to public employees for remarks they made in the course of their official duties.   Federal appeals courts have since split on whether that denial of protection extends even to a situation where a worker has been fired or otherwise disciplined for refusing to file an official report about their work, when superiors had demanded that the report be submitted in a form that would be false and could conceal wrongdoing within the agency.   The Justices’ refusal to step into that controversy leaves it to be worked out further among the lower courts, meaning that public employees will have different legal rights depending upon where they live and work.

The denial of review of that issue came amid a series of new orders, with the Court granting no new cases for decision.   In  one of the other orders, the Court refused — for the second time — to allow a conservative advocacy organization named Freedom Watch to join in the oral arguments on the new health care law.   Freedom Watch is not directly involved in the case, but it regards the new law as a forbidden intrusion into the private lives of Americans.  It has filed a friend-of-Court brief in the case seeking to compel Justice Elena Kagan’s disqualification from taking part in the coming decision, on the argument that she was involved previously as a government lawyer in the Obama Administration’s pursuit of the new law in Congress.   The Court refused on January 23 to grant Freedom Watch time in the oral argument, and, in the new order, it simply refused to reconsider.  Justice Kagan took herself out of the Court’s action on both occasions without saying why, but apparently because Freedom Watch’s challenge was a claim against her but was not one involving a formal motion for her to recuse.  If there were a formal recusal motion, she would act on it directly.  The Court’s orders on the argument issue contained no explanation.   There is no indication that Kagan will take herself out of participation in the health care argument or ruling.

In one of the public employee free-speech cases, Byrne, et al., v. Jackler (docket 11-517), the police chief and two other officers in Middletown, N.Y., sought to challenge a Second Circuit Court decision that they had acted illegally for their roles in the firing of a probationary officer after he had refused an order to file a report about another officer’s striking of a suspect during an arrest.  The fired officer, Jason M. Jackler, disobeyed because he knew the facts were different from those he was told to put in the report.  The Second Circuit ruled that Jackler was not acting in the role of a police officer, but rather as a private citizen resisting an official coverup, at the time he disobeyed, so the Garcetti decision did not apply.

Exactly the opposite outcome had come in the other case, Bowie v. Maddox (11-670).  David M. Bowie, a former FBI agent who had gone to work in the local Washington, D.C., government’s inspector general’s office, investigating misconduct inside the D.C. government.  Bowie was fired after he had refused to submit an affidavit that would have sided with his superiors falsely in a civil rights case involving a black employee against the IG office.  Bowie believed that the employee had been fired on demand from the FBI, which was reportedly upset by an earlier lawsuit claiming race bias in the Bureau’s policy on promoting black agents.  Bowie’s superiors wanted him to tell their version in the affidavit.  The D.C. Circuit Court, relying upon the Supreme Court’s Garcetti decision, ruled against Bowie, concluding that he was fired for refusing to carry out an order in the line of duty and thus had no First Amendment protection for his refusal.

Besides turning down both of those petitions, the Supreme Court on Monday refused to hear a constitutional challenge to a Maine law that requires those seeking to raise and spend money in state election campaigns to organize as a political action committee for that activity, and make significant disclosures about their financial operations.   That was challenged in a petition, National Organization for Marriage v. McKee (11-599), after the state law was upheld by the First Circuit Court.  The NOM is an organization set up to promote the traditional view of marriage as being reserved solely for opposite-sex couples.  It argued in challenging the PAC requirement that states do not have the constitutional authority to impose such obligations unless an organization has election campaign activity as its “major purpose.”

Posted in Cases in the Pipeline, Featured

Recommended Citation: Lyle Denniston, Free speech issue bypassed, SCOTUSblog (Feb. 27, 2012, 12:23 PM), http://www.scotusblog.com/2012/02/free-speech-issue-bypassed/

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Free speech issue bypassed