Free speech

Legal theorists and lawmakers have always struggled to fully understand the purpose and bounds of the right to free speech, and the challenges have multiplied with today’s communications technology. Publication and distribution of speech is no longer expensive. The bottlenecks of the industrial era media (such as newspapers and broadcasters) must now compete with websites and social media platforms. Libel, privacy invasions, and wide-spread gossip are no longer problems exclusive the celebrity class as all private individuals have the potential to be the object of fascination, ridicule, and derision in the searchable public sphere. And in an information economy, economic regulations are more likely to be information regulations (and, thus, will have to tangle with First Amendment precedent.)

TechLaw faculty and fellows are leading sources of knowledge and policy recommendations in the frenetic free speech discourse. Jane Bambauer [hyperlink]  is a founding editor of the peer-reviewed Journal of Free Speech Law, and she, Derek Bambauer, and Andrew Keane Woods have published some of the most influential scholarship on free speech theory for new speech technologies. Their work includes:

Jane Bambauer & Derek Bambauer, Information Libertarianism, 105 California Law Review 335 (2017)

Andrew Keane Woods, Against Data Exceptionalism, 68 Stanford Law Review 729 (2016)

Jane Bambauer, Is Data Speech?, 66 Stanford Law Review 54 (2014)

Derek Bambauer, Orwell’s Armchair, 79 U. Chicago Law Review 863 (2012)

Derek Bambauer, Cyberseives, 59 Duke Law Journal 377 (2009)