Academic

West on the Press Clause

By Lawrence Solum

Sonja West (University of Georgia School of Law) has posted Awakening the Press Clause (UCLA Law Review, Forthcoming) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

The Free Press Clause enjoys less practical significance than almost any other constitutional provision. While recognizing the structural and expressive importance of a free press, the Supreme Court has never recognized explicitly any right or protection as emanating solely from the Press Clause. Recently in the Court?s Citizens United decision, Justices Stevens and Scalia reignited the 30-year-old debate over whether the Press Clause has any function separate from the Speech Clause.

The primary roadblock to recognizing independent meaning in the Press Clause is the definitional problem - who or what is the ?press?? Others have attempted to define the press, but the ubiquitous instinct toward constitutional overprotection has resulted in overly broad definitions that include potentially everyone. These over-inclusive definitions have failed because they attempt to transfer our constitutionally overprotective approach to the Speech Clause to the Press Clause. The net result has been, ironically, fewer constitutional press rights rather than more.

This article enters this debate by arguing what no scholar has argued before - the way to give long-overdue meaning to this important piece of constitutional text is to embrace press exceptionalism and a narrow definition of the ?press.? By adopting an overly protective approach to the Press Clause we have been sucked into a constitutional feedback loop - an expansive definition of the press means virtually complete overlap between press and speech and thus no meaningful way to interpret the Press Clause. Awakening the Press Clause, therefore, requires embracing a definition of the press that is sufficiently narrow. This article furthermore submits that the definitional problem is manageable because line-drawing perfectionism is not required thanks to the fallback protections of the Speech Clause.

And from the paper:

[W]hat are the unique functions of press? I suggest that the press fills two primary roles that go beyond the values served by our basic free speech rights. The first it that the press gathers and conveys information to the public about newsworthy matters, and the second is that the press serves as a check on the government by conveying information to the voters about ?what [their] government is up to.?230 We can look, moreover, to legislative experimentation with defining the press as a starting point by asking which, if any, of these definitions best captures the special role of the press. Under any definitional scheme, of course, the courts must continually patrol for signs of content-based or viewpoint-based discrimination.

Very interesting and recommended.

Full post as published by Legal Theory Blog on October 21, 2010 (boomark / email).