Tag: Seigenthaler-Sutherland Cup National First Amendment Competition

by Leah Rosenberg*

When does a public official’s private social media account become a tool of governance subject to constitutional analysis? In this Contribution, Leah Rosenberg (’19) argues that public officials who use their personal social media pages to interact with the public and announce policy should be required to protect constituents’ constitutional rights and may not engage in viewpoint discrimination. This Contribution recommends that courts apply a context-specific approach to censorship claims against state officials and that court consider the specific activities challenged by assessing whether state resources and employees were used to take those actions, if the content pertained to government activities or policy, and whether the official was acting as an agent of the state at the time the censorship occurred.

By Maggie Seery*

Does a state official engage in viewpoint discrimination in a state-sponsored forum when they delete a constituent’s comments or block them from their social media pages? In this Contribution, Maggie Seery (’19) discusses the possible constitutional violations an official may make when using social media to interact with the public. Ultimately, this Contribution argues that deleting a comment or blocking a user from a public social media page constitutes unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination.

by Alec Webley*

Does a school district violate the First Amendment when they ban stickers reading “Screw Hate, Don’t Discriminate,” and if so, how? Alec Webley (’16) examines this question, presented at the 2015 Seigenthaler First Amendment Moot Court Competition at Vanderbilt University. Supreme Court doctrine recognizes that a school or educator may suppress student speech – speech that, in other contexts, would receive First Amendment protections – that is “lewd,” and therefore inconsistent with a school’s educational mission. This Contribution critiques this lewdness test as impermissibly vague, content-based, and overbroad, and proposes an alternative method through which schools could productively address and sanction “lewd” speech.