First Amendment - Speech Flashcards
What types of speech are held to strict scrutiny?
Content based regulation.
Content based regulation involves:
1) A viewpoint is regulated OR
2) A subject matter is regulated.
What type of speech is held to intermediate scrutiny?
Content Neutral Regulation.
Content Neutral Regulation involves:
1) Viewpoint is neutral AND
2) Subject matter is neutral.
What is the standard for deciding if speech is content based?
If the government has adopted a regulation of speech because of agreement or disagreement with the message it conveys, then it is content based.
What is the standard for if regulation is content neutral?
If it advances an important governmental interests unrelated to the suppression of free speech and does not burden substantially more speech than necessary to further those interests.
What are time, place, and manner regulations?
These are allowed as long as they are content neutral and regulate only time, place, and manner and are designed to serve a substantial government interest and do not unreasonably limit alternate avenues of communication.
In National Endowment for the Arts v. Finley, the government was determining who got funding for their art and who did not. The group giving funding would do so using general standards of decency and respect for the diverse beliefs of the American public. Was this constitutional?
Yes. Because the NEA grants awards according to the artistic worth of competing applications, so absolute neutrality is impossible.
Pleasant Grove, Utah v. Summum
Is Government Speech regulated by the First Amendment?
No. Government speech is not regulated by the First Amendment. The government has a right to speak, just like an individual. The First Amendment simply restricts the ability of the government to regulate private individuals speak.
What is Vagueness?
The law is written in a way that the government does not know how to properly enforce it and the people do not know how to abide by it.
What is overbreadth?
A law is unconstitutionally overbroad if it regulates substantially more speech than the Constitution allows to be regulated, and a person to whom the law can be applied can argue that it would be unconstitutionally applied to others.
How is the requirements of standing altered for challenging laws for broadness?
Overbroad laws can be challenged by those who would normally not have direct standing to challenge them. Although these individuals were not directly harmed by the law, they can still challenge the law.
How broad must a law be to qualify as an overbroad statute?
it cannot simply be overbroad, it must also be real problem and it must be substantially overbroad.
