A California court recently ruled that a lawsuit in which a group representing deaf citizens contended that CNN must provide captioning for videos uploaded to its website may proceed. The group, The Greater Los Angeles Agency on Deafness, brought...(read more)
Exercising the Right to Record the Police May Lead to Obstruction Charges
We previously wrote here and here about cases involving wiretapping prosecutions as a result of recording police activities. In addition to running afoul of wiretapping statutes, citizens or journalists who videotape or record the police have also...(read more)
Fourth Circuit Upholds Right to Publish Government Documents Containing SSNs
I’m going to devote a few posts over the next several weeks to some intriguing cases from 2010 that you might have missed. One such case is a fascinating decision from the Fourth Circuit, Ostergren v. Cuccinelli , 615 F.3d 263 (2010) , in which the...(read more)
Blue Language Given Thumbs Up in North Carolina
Sorry, this blog post is not about the Duke-UNC rivalry. Instead, it is about a First Amendment decision handed down by a trial judge last month that qualifies as being on the lighter, if not cleaner, side. The case involved North Carolina's...(read more)
Hawaii District Court Rejects Candidate's Request to Stop Televised Political Debate
The U.S. District Court for District of Hawaii issued an order on May 7, 2010, denying a federal candidate’s request to be included in a televised debate among the candidates for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. The order is available...(read more)
Supreme Court Dogfighting Opinion A Boon To Media
The United States Supreme Court's recent decision in U.S. v. Stevens , which invalidated on First Amendment grounds a federal statute criminalizing the commercial creation, sale, or possession of a "depiction of animal cruelty," has been widely...(read more)
ACLU and North Carolina Department of Corrections Reach Settlement over Prisoner Publications
Pursuant to the terms of a recent settlement between the American Civil Liberties Union of North Carolina Legal Foundation (ACLU-NCLF) and the N.C. Department of Correction (DOC), prison inmates in North Carolina may now write novels and other...(read more)