Senior Attorney @IJ (opinions are my own). I tweet about the First Amendment, constitutional law, and chess (username psherman31 @chesscom and @lichess)
Jun 13 • 16 tweets • 4 min read
If anyone is looking to write about First Amendment stuff, the Supreme Court's decision today in Vidal v. Elster definitively shows that the Third Circuit's approach to content-neutrality is wrong. Here's a wonky thread explaining why.🧵
Vidal is a First Amendment challenge to a portion of a federal law--the Lanham Act--that prohibits people from registering trademarks containing the name of another person without that person's consent. The Supreme Court held that the law did not violate the First Amendment.
Oct 31, 2023 • 22 tweets • 4 min read
Hawley apparently plans to introduce a "bill reversing Citizens United." Such a bill would be unconstitutional, so this is just populist nonsense. But it's worth pointing out that basically everything he believes about Citizens United is wrong.🧵
realclearpolitics.com/articles/2023/…
First of all, before Citizens United was decided, the rule that it announced--that corporations can spend money on electoral advocacy--was already the rule in a majority of American states. There's no evidence those states were more corrupt or less well governed than the minority
Oct 4, 2023 • 16 tweets • 3 min read
SCOTUS is not broadly libertarian, but one notable exception is its First Amendment jurisprudence, which has become MUCH more libertarian over the past 30 years. It's no exaggeration to say that the current Court's fundamental theory of the 1st Amend. is libertarian. 🧵
This is in contrast with earlier theories of the First Amendment, which were focused more on the instrumental value of speech for democratic self-governance. These theories were championed by Alexander Meikeljohn, Robert Bork, and, more recently, Robert Post.
