The 2017 Jefferson Muzzles awards have been announced and Illinois has earned a spot on the list. Each year on their namesake’s April 13 birthday, the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression awards this dubious recognition to the year’s most egregious free speech censors. Past recipients include the Bradley County, Tennessee sheriff’s [...]
What the public wants to know, power often prefers to keep secret. Particularly in this media-hostile climate, it is more important than ever to know how to access information and what rights you have as a member of the press or public. The law, after all, favors transparency and public participation - if you know [...]
I haven’t been overly concerned about Donald Trump’s election. Though I’m not a fan, I’m mostly curious about the reasons he won and am fascinated by the abrupt deviation it seems we’re about to take from the only identity I’ve ever known our country to have. As a leader, I do find him an unfortunate [...]
Wow: Election 2016. And we’re back on flag burning. I am fascinated and disturbed that this debate still rages because it exposes a particular rot at the core of our country – one that I fear threatens to undo us. So I’m going to ditch my usual constitutional backdrop and get straight to the point [...]
The First Amendment has had a nice showing in the current election cycle. Almost every day there's a new debate about whether the flood of threats, misstatements and accusations being bandied about are entitled to protection. So instead of covering all of that here, I say we use the opportunity to take a look at [...]
Threats, trolls, online harassment – what's a First Amendment lover to think about where we're going with social media? After the shooting of five Dallas police and transit officers at a Black Lives Matter rally this summer and a similar incident in Baton Rouge, Facebook and Twitter sizzled with incendiary statements calling for more violence [...]
There’s no shortage of First Amendment fodder as this unprecedentedly weird election cycle unfolds. Where do the candidates stand? Here’s a few things you should know. The most important First Amendment position taken by any of the candidates is Democrat Hillary Clinton’s announcement that she would seek a reversal of the Supreme Court’s ominously democracy-hobbling [...]
Schools are not simply places that students go to learn reading, math and kick around a soccer ball during gym. They are the essential training ground for participation in our representative democracy. It's important that students learn to voice their opinions, and consider and respond to unfamiliar or disagreeable ideas. Since the Supreme Court's 1988 [...]
