Archive | First Amendment

At long last, the article Evan Ringel and I wrote on First Amendment Limits on State Laws Targeting Election Misinformation has finally been published in the First Amendment Law Review.  The piece expands on a whitepaper we wrote in 2021 that cataloged state efforts to regulate election-related speech (available on SSRN).

I’ve pasted the abstract below, but if you want to read it in bite size chunks, I will be posting a series of excerpts at the Volokh Conspiracy this week.  The first post just went up today!

Here is the abstract:

The last two presidential election cycles have brought increased attention to the extent of misinformation – and outright lies – peddled by political candidates, their surrogates, and others who seek to influence election outcomes. Given the ubiquity of this speech, especially online, one might assume that there are no laws against lying in politics. It turns out that the opposite is true. Although the federal government has largely stayed out of regulating the content of election-related speech, the states have been surprisingly active in passing laws that prohibit false statements associated with elections.

Prompted by concern about the impact of misinformation on the American electorate, we set out to assess the extent to which existing state and federal laws limit election misinformation and the prospect that these laws will survive First Amendment scrutiny. In doing so, we reviewed more than 125 state statutes that regulate the content of election-related speech, ranging from statutes that prohibit false and misleading factual statements about candidates to laws that indirectly regulate election-related speech by prohibiting fraud and intimidation concerning elections.

What we found is that state statutes regulating election misinformation vary widely in the types of speech they target and the level of fault they require, with many statutes suffering from serious constitutional deficiencies. Statutes that target defamatory speech or speech that harms the election process, is fraudulent, or that intimidates voters are likely to be permissible, while statutes that target other types of speech that have not traditionally been subject to government restriction, such as statutes that target merely derogatory speech, will face an uphill battle in demonstrating that they are constitutional. Furthermore, statutes that impose liability without regard to the speaker’s knowledge of falsity or intent to interfere with an election are especially problematic.

Political speech has long been viewed as residing at the core of the First Amendment’s protections for speech. Yet it has become increasingly clear that lies and other forms of misinformation associated with elections are corrosive to democracy. The challenge, of course, is in developing regulatory regimes that advance the interest in free and fair elections while at the same time ensuring that debate on public issues remains uninhibited, robust, and wide-open. This is no easy task. Regardless of whether individual statutes survive First Amendment scrutiny, it is useful to understand the breadth and depth of state attempts to deal with lies, misinformation, intimidation, and fraud in elections. As we point out, any legislative approach to combatting election misinformation must be part of a broader societal effort to reduce the prevalence of misinformation generally and to mitigate the harms that such speech creates.

You can read the full version of the article here.

I am thrilled to announce that my article on First Amendment theory, “Beyond the Marketplace of Ideas: Bridging Theory and Doctrine to Promote Self-Governance,” recently came out in the Harvard Law & Policy Review.  Here is the abstract:

No theory dominates both public and judicial understanding of the First Amendment quite like the “marketplace of ideas.” While faith in free competition among ideas holds tremendous appeal, as an organizing theory for the formulation of First Amendment doctrine it has proven to be deeply problematic. The theory rests on an overly simplified account of public discourse, treating speech as a commodity that can be allocated through market-style transactions, and it has come to embody an extreme version of libertarian economic thinking that is undermining the very democratic processes the First Amendment was intended to serve and strengthen.

The belief that public discourse takes place within a self-regulating market that needs only the presence of more speech to produce “truth” has not held up to empirical scrutiny. Indeed, social scientists who study the impact of the Internet, social media, and other forms of digital information sharing on our public sphere paint a disturbing picture of the health of American democracy. Our current media ecosystem produces too little high-quality information; we tend to be attracted to information that confirms our existing biases about the world and to share this information with little regard for its veracity; and there are an increasing number of actors who seek to leverage these vulnerabilities to distort public discourse and undermine democratic decision-making.

This article applies the insights of constitutional structuralism to argue that the First Amendment was intended to play a vital role in the American constitutional system: facilitating self-governance by ensuring that citizens are capable of participating in the deliberative processes that are essential to a representative democracy. With self-governance as the touchstone, it lays out three principles that should guide the development of First Amendment doctrines. First, we need to move beyond the idea that the First Amendment’s only function is to enshrine free market ideology. Second, the First Amendment does not bar the government from addressing market failures in the actual markets in which communication takes place, especially when those failures undermine the public’s capacity for self-governance. Third, the capacity for self-governance turns, at least in part, on whether the public has the information it needs to effectively evaluate issues of public policy.

This article proposes a number of ways to bridge theory and doctrine to promote self-governance, including using antitrust law to address concentrated economic power in communication markets, expanding and enforcing privacy and consumer protection laws to create more competition among speech platforms, and initiating programs that support journalism and other knowledge institutions within society. It also argues that as an influential participant in public discourse, the government should have an obligation to wield its influence in ways that support self-governance, not undermine it by misleading its citizens or starving them of the information they need. I therefore propose two new rights that should be recognized under the First Amendment: a right not to be lied to by the government when it undermines the public’s capacity for self-governance and a right to information in the government’s possession that can assist the public in its efforts to understand and evaluate issues of government policy.

You can download the full paper on SSRN.

This article lays the groundwork for a series of articles I plan to write examining various First Amendment doctrines from the perspective of whether they advance or hinder self-governance. The first of these follow-up articles argues for an expanded right of access to government information. I’ll be sending that out to law reviews later this fall.