True Threats and Free Speech

By on January 22, 2015 in First Amendment, Internet

The extent to which the First Amendment protects threatening messages on Facebook and elsewhere will be the subject of a panel discussion at the UNC School of Law at noon on Monday, Jan. 26.

Co-sponsored by the UNC Center for Media Law and Policy, the discussion will focus on Elonis v. United States, a case recently argued before the U.S. Supreme Court. You can read more about the event here.

One of the panelists will be UNC School of Journalism and Mass Communication Ph.D. student Brooks Fuller, who recently had an article about threatening Internet messages and the First Amendment published in the Hastings Communication & Entertainment Law Journal. The citation is: P. Brooks Fuller, Evaluating Intent in True Threats Cases: The Importance of Context in Analyzing Threatening Internet Messages, 37 Hastings Comm. & Ent. L. J. 37 (2015).

From the abstract:

Following the Supreme Court’s most recent ruling on the true threats doctrine, Virginia v. Black (2003), significant conflict emerged among the federal circuit courts. The primary issue became whether the First Amendment, as interpreted by the Court in Virginia v. Black, requires a subjective intent standard to be read into all statutes that criminalize true threats, or whether the First Amendment only requires such a statute to require the prosecution to demonstrate that a reasonable person would consider the message to be a true threat. Speakers’ use of social networking websites and Internet forums for the purposes of posting violent and intimidating communications raises significant questions regarding the posture of the true threats doctrine and its application to modern modes of communication. In June 2014, the Supreme Court granted certiorari in Elonis v. United States, a true threats case involving posts on Facebook. The defendant, who posted violent messages in the form of rap lyrics and other pop culture references, argued that the trial courts misread Virginia v. Black and violated his First Amendment rights when it failed to instruct the jury to consider his subjective intent in addition to the objective standard. This paper utilizes legal research methods to examine federal courts’ treatment of Internet threats and highlights aspects of Internet speech that are particularly problematic for the true threats doctrine.

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Media Law Grad Student Selected for Future Faculty Fellowship Program

By on January 11, 2015 in Journalism

Kriste Patrow, a first-year Ph.D. student in the UNC School of Journalism and Mass Communication who works in the Center for Media Law and Policy, has been selected to participate in the Future Faculty Fellowship Program (FFFP) at Carolina. Run by the University’s Center for Faculty Excellence, the semester-long program introduces graduate students to evidence-based teaching practices, helps them understand the roles and responsibilities of faculty members at different types of institutions of higher education, and helps them reflect on their professional goals. Admission to the FFFP is competitive and comes with an honorarium.
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Kriste will teach Introduction to Media Law to undergraduates in the journalism school this summer.

Congratulations, Kriste!

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Anne Gilliland

By on January 1, 2015 in Center for Media Law and Policy

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Anne Gilliland has been the scholarly communications officer for the libraries at UNC-CH since 2012. She advises the library staff on copyright and related matters; and she offers consultations, workshops, and presentations on copyright and scholarly publishing to UNC faculty, staff, and students. Previously, she was the head of the Health Sciences Copyright Management Office at the Ohio State University.

Before earning her J.D. from Capital University in 2008, Gilliland held a variety of positions in university libraries. These included 15 years as an assistant director for the Ohio Library and Information Network and nine years as the systems coordinator at the University of the South. She also holds a bachelor’s degree from Maryville College and a master’s degree in library and information science from the University of Tennessee. Her research interests include privacy issues in library archives and copyright information needs of the academy.

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Dave Hansen

By on January 1, 2015 in Center for Media Law and Policy

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Dave Hansen is a clinical assistant professor and faculty research librarian at UNC School of Law, where he runs the library’s faculty research service. From 2011 to 2015, Hansen served as UC Berkeley Law’s Digital Library Fellow. His research has focused on how libraries and related information intermediaries can overcome copyright and other legal obstacles to provide better access to their collections online. He has written specifically on copyright exceptions for libraries and archives under Section 108 of the Copyright Act, orphan works, mass digitization, copyright protection of metadata, and issues related to expanding copyright protection of traditional knowledge. He is one of primary facilitators for a project that created the “Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use of Collections Containing Orphan Works for Libraries, Archives, and Other Memory Institutions,” which was released in December 2014. Hansen also has contributed to briefs filed on behalf of libraries, academic authors, and legal scholars in Authors Guild v. Google (Google Books digitization case), Authors Guild v. HathiTrust (research library digitization), and Cambridge University Press v. Becker (faculty use of e-reserves), and he has actively participated in submitting comments and speaking at roundtables hosted by federal agencies on library copyright issues. Hansen is a graduate of UNC’s School of Law (J.D., 2010) and School of Information and Library Science (M.S.L.S., 2012).

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Anne Klinefelter

By on January 1, 2015 in Center for Media Law and Policy

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Anne Klinefelter is director of the law library and associate professor of law, positions she has held since 2007. She teaches courses on privacy law and writes and speaks on information policy and law topics including privacy and confidentiality law, particularly as those areas apply to libraries. Klinefelter also serves on the advisory board of the Future of Privacy Forum. Klinefelter has been active in library associations and library education. In 2012, she received the Distinguished Lecturer Award from the American Association of Law Libraries. She is a past chair of the American Association of Law Schools Section on Law Libraries and past president of the Southeastern Chapter of the American Association of Law Libraries. She also chaired the Copyright Committee of the American Association of Law Libraries. Klinefelter held leadership roles in two library consortia, serving as chair of the Consortium of Southeastern Academic Law Libraries and of the Triangle Research Libraries Network Council of Directors. Klinefelter has taught courses on law librarianship, legal research, and copyright law for librarians in the UNC School of Information and Library Science. Prior to coming to UNC, Klinefelter served as acting director of the law library at the University of Miami and also held positions in the law libraries at Boston University and the University of Alabama. She holds a bachelor’s degree with majors in English and Spanish, a master’s degree in library science, and a J.D. from the University of Alabama.

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