Federal Judge Dismisses $95 Million Defamation Suit Against Comedian Sacha Baron Cohen
A federal judge dismissed a long-running defamation suit brought by former Alabama Supreme Court Judge Roy Moore against comedian Sacha Baron Cohen. The suit was filed in September 2018, after Cohen’s satirical Showtime series, “Who Is America?” aired a spot featuring Moore.
Lawsuit Against Texas Attorney General Who Blocked Critics on Twitter is Dismissed
On July 9th, nine constituents dismissed their lawsuit against Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton after he agreed to unblock them from his Twitter account. The nine plaintiffs, who were represented by the Knight First Amendment Institute, sued Paxton in April after he blocked them for criticizing some of his policies.
Supreme Court Will Hear Case About Whether Digital Billboard Ordinance Violates the First Amendment
On June 28th, the Supreme Court agreed to hear arguments in a case about whether Austin, Texas’s digital billboard policy violates the First Amendment. In 2017, Reagan National Advertising sued the city of Austin in state district court over a rule that prohibits billboards from being digitized if they appear anywhere other than a business’s property.
Supreme Court Rules that Student’s Off-Campus Speech Is Protected By the First Amendment
In an 8-1 decision on June 23rd, the Supreme Court ruled that a student’s off-campus speech was protected by the First Amendment. The case, Mahanoy Area School District v B.L., involves a message posted on Snapchat by a then-14 year old student identified as “B.L.”, after she learned she failed to advance from the junior varsity to the varsity cheerleading squad. The message, posted on a Saturday afternoon when she was off-campus, stated, in part, “f*** cheer, f***everything.”
On June 21st, a federal judge dismissed lawsuits filed against then-President Donald Trump and other federal officials who were being sued for violating the rights of protestors last June. After a group of protestors were forcibly removed from Lafayette Park in Washington, D.C. on June 1, 2020, the ACLU of D.C., Black Lives Matters, and others filed suit against Trump, then-Attorney William Barr, and other federal officials alleging that they conspired to violate demonstrators right to protest when they cleared the park to allow Trump to pose for a photo op in front of a nearby historic church.
Fifth Circuit Rules A Public School Employee’s Criticism of a Superintendent Isn’t Protected Speech
On June 17th, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that an employee’s speech who criticized a school superintendent was made pursuant to his official job-duties and, thus, fell within the large ambit of Garcetti v. Ceballos (2006). The decision shows the vast reach of the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Garcetti that created a categorical exception for job-duty speech that limited public employee First Amendment retaliation claims.
A prisoner rights group had its First Amendment claim against an Arkansas county’s ban on inmate mail other than postcards reinstated by a divided federal appeals court panel. The panel reasoned that the district court needed to make factual findings on whether there were other ways the prisoner rights group could have communicated with the inmates.
Colorado Supreme Court Rejects First Amendment Challenge to Lawyer Disciplinary Rule
A Colorado rule prohibiting lawyers from referring to individuals during a legal process with language exhibiting bias or animus on the basis of sexual orientation does not violate the First Amendment, the state’s high court has ruled. The ruling came in the case of an attorney who was disciplined for calling a judge a “gay, fat, fag.”