If the United States Supreme Court is to exercise its historic role as guardian of the fundamental freedoms flowing from the speech and press clauses of the first amendment, it is imperative that those basic freedoms be placed in a preferred position. The preferred position doctrine provides adequate safeguards for both speech and press guarantees…

Official censorship should not exist in university theatre productions. What censorship does exist is primarily unofficial--often unspoken--and consists of group, authority, and financial pressures on the director and the production staff, influencing them to avoid risks necessary for artistic growth and intellectual development. This sort of…

Under the "commercial speech doctrine," corporations were restricted for many years from speaking out on public issues or engaging in certain advertising practices. This "doctrine" was based on a case from the 1940s, in which the court ruled that purely commercial advertising had no constitutional protection from government…

A 1973 Supreme Court decision ("Miller v. California") established the system of defining obscenity on the local level according to the following criteria: first, prurient appeal and patent offensiveness are to be determined by a community rather than by a national standard; second, sexually explicit materials are judged obscene only if…

Enacted in 1959, the Landrum-Griffin Act or Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act was intended to attain maximum protection for the rights of individual workers within the union without undermining the union as an institution necessary for the existence of collective bargaining. Title I is the union members' bill of rights; titles II-VI…

The content of pretrial crime stories in a national sample of 29 newspapers was analyzed to discover the extent of violations of the voluntary free-press fair-trial guidelines of the American Bar Association (ABA), which have been adopted by 23 states. The investigation also considered the relationship between violations and several relevant…

Standard legal methods, statutory developments, case law, and attorney generals' opinions were analyzed in a study of the nine states that received the lowest rankings in J. B. Adams's 1974 investigation of open meeting laws across the United States. In addition, statutory and judicial open meeting activity in the remaining 41 states was surveyed…

To make democracy work, whatever relates to government or public business should be open to comprehensive scrutiny; conversely, whatever is related to individual citizens and their private lives should be protected from undesired exposure. This recognized need to balance privacy and the right to know reflects an inevitable conflict. Despite the…

This report describes the possible impact of the comprehensive Privacy Act of 1974, which went into effect on 27 September 1975. Specifically, the implications of the act for limitation of disclosure, federal information collection, individual access, private suits; criminal provisions; and exceptions to the provisions of the law are detailed. In…

Via a case study, this paper explores the legal question of whether a local school board's inquiry into the fitness of its teachers can extend outside the classroom. This issue is discussed within the framework of two divergent views concerning the absolute nature of First Amendment rights on the one hand and a compelling state interest that may…

This syllabus of a convention workshop course on free speech theory consists of descriptions of several United States Supreme Court decisions related to free speech. Some specific areas in which decisions are discussed are: obscene and indecent communication, the definition of a public figure for purposes of libel action, the press versus official…

The absolutist approach to the First Amendment of the United States Constitution--argued for many years by Supreme Court Justices Hugo L. Black and William O. Douglas--is regarded as the most libertarian interpretation by most mass communication law students. However, the two justices found agreement difficult in some First Amendment cases,…

Although the ultimate objectives of much campus protest are unclear, students generally want to be free of paternalistic university supervision. But they seem to want both academic shelter against the outside community and freedom from control by the university. We must examine the extent to which the university should treat its students as…

Institutional autonomy is a relative concept affected both by external constraints and by the attitudes and experience of those within the institution. The identity of an institution is the image established by the dynamics of its constituents and the freedom they exercise in establishing this identity determines its autonomy. In California,…

Because the scene of the struggle to control men's minds has shifted from other battlefields to the university, the university must reappraise its role and responsibilities as a democratic institution within a democracy. The important question is not "who shall govern the university," but "for what end shall the university be governed." Procedures…