National Free Speech News & Commentary

Giovanna Dell'orto
Associated Press

Excerpt: A University of Notre Dame professor has filed a defamation lawsuit against a student-run publication over news coverage of her abortion-rights work. The case is raising questions about press freedom and academic freedom at one of the nation’s preeminent Catholic universities.

Tamara Kay’s suit, filed in May, alleges falsehoods in two articles published by The Irish Rover in the past academic year. The Rover defended its reporting as true in a motion filed earlier this month to dismiss the case, under a law meant to protect people from frivolous lawsuits over matters of public concern.

Aaron Terr
Foundation for Individual Rights in Expression

Excerpt: Vulgar. Lewd. Indecent. Hateful. Those are four types of speech the city of Arab, Alabama, bans from signs within its borders. But as FIRE explained in a letter to the city on Tuesday, they’re also four types of speech protected by the First Amendment.

Jonathan Feingold, Angela Harris & Athena Mutua
Newsweek

Excerpt: Last March, Stanford Law students protested when a Trump-appointed judge spoke on campus. An administrator intervened, defending her students' and the judge's right to speak. Her actions nonetheless triggered a rightwing campaign demanding her ouster, and last week, Stanford announced the administrator will not return. To borrow from modern parlance, she was "cancelled."

The story is one of many examples, a reoccurring dynamic in which students speak, then administrators respond (or don't), followed by pundits decrying "cancel culture" and a "free speech crisis." These pundits are in fact right, though not in the way they think. Free speech is under attack. But the students aren't to blame.

Jonathan Turley
Jonathan Turley’s Blog

Excerpt: I have previously written columns about the rising generation of censors in our country. After years of being told that free speech is harmful and dangerous, many young people are virtual speech phobics — demanding that opposing views be silenced as “triggering” or even forms of violence. Now a Pew poll shows just how much ground we have lost, including the emergence of the Democratic Party as a virulent anti-free speech party.

The result is reflected in the poll which shows that “Just over half of Americans (55%) support the U.S. government taking steps to restrict false information online, even if it limits people from freely publishing or accessing information.”

Aleks Phillips
Newsweek

Excerpt: Just over two years after Tennessee Governor Bill Lee signed a new law that restricted what can be taught in classrooms about race, gender and bias, a lawsuit brought by public school educators seeks to challenge its constitutionality.

In a filing brought by the Tennessee Education Association, a teachers' organization, along with five educators from the state on Tuesday, they said the ban placed vague restrictions on what teachers were allowed to reference—in an apparent violation of the Fourteenth Amendment—and which made the threat of disciplinary action greater due to its subjectivity.

Jerry Coyne
Why Evolution is True

Excerpt: This could be a long article if I summarized all the mishigass going on in the community college system of the state of California, but I’ll try to be brief and put the items in numbered form. The upshot is that the system has thrown its hat entirely in the DEI ring, making all faculty and staff pledge fealty not just to DEI, but to the extreme Ibram Kendi-an view of DEI. And if you don’t obey they’re rules for behaving as an “antiracist”, you could be demoted, fired, or denied tenure.