Media Room
Commentary
Post Search
Partners in Crime
In July of 2021, Meta’s head of global affairs, Nick Clegg, emailed a Facebook vice president in charge of content policy, asking why the company had removed from Facebook, rather than demoted or flagged, claims that COVID-19 was “man-made.” Rice responded, “Because we were under pressure from the [Biden] administration and others to do more and it…
Read
New York and Massachusetts: Your Digital Devices Are Constitution-Free Zones
Blogs
The digital age is dead; long live the digital age. Once, we understood as a matter of common sense that what we posted online or did on our phones, while digital, was still real. A mean Tweet is mean speech; and your digital files are property, because why else would you have a password to exclude…
Read
In Landmark Free Speech Case, Fifth Circuit Judge Likens Government Coercion Of Big Tech To ‘Mob’ Boss
Whether or not the federal government and its myriad agencies will be able to coerce, cajole, encourage, threaten, and browbeat social media companies into removing views it does not like from their platforms was the question before the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals last week. The government made an expedited appeal of the July 4th order of the…
Read
The Major Questions Doctrine Is Compatible with Textualism
In the News
The Supreme Court in several recent cases has explicitly applied what it refers to as the “major questions doctrine” (MQD) when construing the meaning of federal statutes. Under the Doctrine, in “extraordinary” cases the Court will not accept a federal agency’s claim that Congress has authorized the agency to make “major policy decisions” with vast…
Read
Judges Attack Judicial Independence
A disturbing constitutional drama is unfolding in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. Chief Judge Kimberly Moore has effectively deprived one of her colleagues, Judge Pauline Newman, of her judicial office. Although not as noisy as recent attacks on the Supreme Court, this could be as dangerous for our republic. Threats to judicial independence ordinarily…
Read
The Biden Administration’s Assault on Free Speech
Among the revelations in the so-called Twitter files was that government officials pressured social-media companies to censor posts unfavorable to the Biden administration. The White House has denied this, insisting that companies like Meta and Twitter adopted content-moderation policies on their own. But internal documents newly released by the House Judiciary Select Subcommittee on Weaponization of the…
Read
Media Team
