Judge Sonia Sotomayor was confirmed by the Senate today as the newest member of the Supreme Court, replacing Justice David H. Souter who retired in June. She becomes the 111th member of the U.S. Supreme Court, as well as the third woman and first Hispanic to serve on it. What does her confirmation mean for the First Amendment? See our [...]
Last week, we analyzed cases from the Second Circuit, in which Sonia Sotomayor had some part in deciding, addressing the right to free expression. Still the Supreme Court’s role, and Sotomayor’s judicial style make it difficult to make a broad statement about how she will decide on free expression issues in the years to come. […]
6/1/2009 On Sotomayor and censorship: First the bad news… 6/2/2009 Student speech under fire under Sotomayor? 6/3/2009 The Good News: Sotomayor’s decision in U.S. v. Quattrone, gagging gag orders 6/4/2009 What about Souter? A closer look at the Supreme Court’s outgoing Associate Justice 6/5/2009 Courts favor “Douchebags”; Doninger redux, and the problem of school censorship when it comes to off campus Internet expression 6/5/2009 Sotomayor [...]
Our analysis of Sotomayor’s free speech record wouldn’t be complete without a mention of her dissent in Pappas v. Giuliani. The case reached the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in 2002 and concerned the firing of Thomas Pappas from the NYPD. The department had found that he had anonymously circulated racist and anti-semitic literature through the mail from his home. [...]
With all the focus on and furor over the nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor, it is easy to lose sight of the Justice she is replacing—indeed, he likes it that way. But any discussion of how Sotomayor will influence the Court’s freedom of expression jurisprudence is incomplete without some reflection on the Justice whose robes she will fill, David Hackett [...]
Evaluating where Sonia Sotomayor stands relative to the principles espoused by the First Amendment is frustrating task for two reasons. First, Sotomayor has not authored that many opinions on free expression issues. More importantly, those opinions she has drafted have been fact specific and have narrowly applied existing laws. Her judicial style prohibits straying into “big picture” territory. That being [...]
Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s record of First Amendment cases has been under scrutiny since President Obama nominated her to the Supreme Court last week. Let’s start with the bad news: In Doninger v. Niehoff (2008)*, Sotomayor was part of a panel of judges who decided that a high school student’s blog posts, made from a home computer, were not protected speech. [...]