NCAC Staff

Did 30 students at a suburban Detroit high school deserve suspensions for joining the latest viral dance craze? Not according to a recent poll. Most people thought it was harmless fun.

  Gene Patents A gene patent case now in the Supreme Court is attracting a lot of attention, not only because of its importance to scientific research and health care but also because of its potential free speech implications.   Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics challenges the validity of patents held by Myriad on the BRCA1 and BRCA2 gene, [...]

    Journalist and scholar H.L. Mencken famously said, “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.” The simple—and wrong—response to mass violence, regularly offered up by pundits and talking heads, is to blame it on representations of violence in the media, especially video games. The reaction to the December 2012 nightmarish shootings in [...]

  NCAC recently launched the first-ever “Museum Best Practices for Managing Controversy” at the College Arts Association Conference in New York City. The document is designed for museums and other cultural institutions concerned about accusations of inappropriate or offensive content, and offers guidelines on how to deal with potential controversies. You can find the guidelines—a joint project with other national [...]

  by Noah Berlatsky The job of American schools, as enforced by the bureaucracy, isn’t really education. It’s censorship. A colleague of mine working on a world history course was told to omit the fact that gay people were targeted during the Holocaust. I was told that I could not, for sensitivity reasons, include a test passage about storms at [...]

    We were deeply saddened by the death of S Jay Levy, a longtime friend and benefactor. A noted economist, he was widely recognized for his economic forecasts. Indeed, one respected commentator observed that he “probably has the best record of any economist in the U.S.” According to Bloomberg News, in 2005 Jay predicted that “the deflating housing bubble” [...]

In January 2012, when Tucson Unified School District (TUSD) students returned from a long weekend, they found teachers boxing up books, and already emptied classroom bookshelves. Literally hundreds – perhaps thousands – of books were packed up and sent to a warehouse. Some of the boxes were marked “Banned.” Students were witnessing the shutdown of the district’s acclaimed Mexican-American Studies [...]

Golan v. Holder Decision In a 6-2 vote, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of a law that will restore copyright protection to foreign works that have previously been in the public domain in the U.S. The law was part of a global trade agreement requiring countries to protect works created in other member states unless the works’ copyright term [...]

In recent years, at least 20 states have either amended existing anti-bullying and school safety laws to include language prohibiting bullying via electronic means, or have created separate statutes focusing on cyberbullying. Definitions of cyberbullying vary in the scope of behavior they cover. Some state statutes and school codes describe it as a type of criminal harassment or stalking. Others [...]

NCAC congratulates the winners of our 2011 Youth Free Expression Film Contest, whose films were screened at the New York Film Academy on March 31st. 1st Place: The Right To Bully? by Jake Gogats and Caitlin Wolper; 2nd Place: Don't Use Your Rights to Make Wrongs  by Summer Lee; 3rd Place: Expressing Freedom in 140 Words or Less by Patrick [...]

by Svetlana Mintcheva, NCAC Director of Programs The New Speech Regulators: PayPal The Web in 2012 is far from the free speech utopia imagined at its dawn back in the early 90’s. Terms-of-service agreements, capricious moderators and automatic systems limit what we can post on Facebook or YouTube; Amazon purges its virtual shelves of offensive content (cf. CN 115). We [...]