The Aporia · Journal of Free Speech Law: "Permission to Speak Freely: An Introduction," by Sam Lebovic

Eugene Volokh

168 article(s) here · 0 carrying a prediction

🔮 The hope would be to siphon votes away from Sullivan.

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🔮 Still others predicted that someone would eventually remove the context and circulate the resulting footage as though Mr. Piker had been speaking sincerely.

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🔮 The Indictment alleges that Holmes posted on that account several statements against the Jewish community and Israel, including: "The jew will be destroyed and discarded," "From the river to the sea every Jew will die," "You inbred people will all die," and "Die Jew."

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🔮 When reviewing whether the evidence was sufficient to support the issuance [or extension] of a 258E order, we consider [consistently with the statutory requirements] whether, "by a preponderance of the evidence, together with all permissible inferences," the judge could have found "that the defendant had committed '[three] or more acts of willful and malicious conduct aimed at a specific person committed with the intent to cause fear, intimidation, abuse or damage to property and that [did] in fact cause fear, intimidation, abuse or damage to property.'"

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2026-10-25 · assertive framing · Open Thread

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🔮 The original TRO—the one actually issued on July 20, 2025—named as plaintiffs eleven individuals and organizations who had never been party to the case; named as defendants two officials who were not actually sued; claimed, without evidence, that three post-secondary institutions had already cancelled DEI initiatives or programming because of the act; further declared, again without evidence, that staff at another school had been told not to discuss certain topics, including "historical interpretations involving systemic racism"; misquoted H.B. 1193 as applying to "race or sex stereotyping," "race or sex scapegoating," "critical race theory," and "institutional bias," despite none of these terms' appearing in the act's text; and referenced purported declarations of four individuals who do not appear in the record at all and may not even exist….

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🔮 Body armor may be used more today than Defendants' understanding of its use in 1791.

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Nothing else under this byline is closely related to this article, so these are simply their most recent.

All 168 articles by Eugene Volokh →

The article is here; the Introduction: In our polarized, paranoid politics, the speech of public employees has produced political controversies across multiple fronts. asserted

speech → produce → fronts

The culture wars that have entangled the nation's classrooms directly implicate the speech rights of educators. asserted

that → entangle → educators

The war over the regulatory and administrative state directly implicates the rights and political activity of civil servants. asserted

war → implicate → servants

Labor conflict within the public sector directly implicates the speech rights of both unions and union members. asserted

conflict → implicate → unions

And the speech acts of public employees—tweeting a political opinion, blowing the whistle on official misconduct, or challenging a policy decision—easily become sites of political controversy, conspiracy theorization, and partisan conflict. asserted

acts → tweet → controversy

But they have not been treated as instances of a broader problem: how a modern, bureaucratized democracy should manage the speech of its government employees. asserted

democracy → treat → employees

The issues are complex, requiring the balancing of competing democratic values: transparency versus autonomy; delegation versus supervision; objectivity versus diversity; tolerance of debate and disagreement versus the need to reach some form of functional consensus for collective governance to continue. asserted

governance → require → consensus

They require parsing the intersection of First Amendment law, administrative law, labor law, democratic theory, and the brute science of American political contestation. asserted

They → require → contestation

In the spring of 2024, the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University gathered an interdisciplinary group of experts to explore these problems. asserted

Institute → gather → problems

Over the course of a two-day event—a private workshop followed by a public symposium—we debated and discussed normative and doctrinal problems in many of the vexed subfields of the law: academic freedom; education policy; whistleblowing and transparency; and unionization in the public sector. asserted

we → follow → sector

The five articles in this collection (plus a sixth, published elsewhere) are one outcome of those enlightening, clarifying conversations. asserted

articles → publish → conversations

Fittingly, given the range and complexity of the legal and political problems involved, these six articles cover a diversity of subjects and make a range of interventions in a range of fields. asserted

articles → give → fields

They do not speak with one voice. asserted

They → speak → voice

But in this introduction, I want to draw out a number of themes and analytical approaches that I have taken both from participating in the events at the Knight Institute and from reading these articles alongside one another. asserted

I → want → one

Journal of Free Speech Law: "Permission to Speak Freely: An Introduction," by Sam Lebovic

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