The Supreme Court’s Theory of Private Law (original) (raw)
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In this Article, we revisit the clash between private law and the First Amendment in the Supreme Court's recent case, Snyder v. Phelps, using a private-law lens. We are scholars who write about private law as individual justice, a perspective that has been lost in recent years but is currently enjoying something of a revival. Our argument is that the Supreme Court's theory of private law has led it down a path that has distorted its doctrine in several areas, including the First Amendment-tort clash in Snyder. In areas that range from punitive damages to preemption, the Supreme Court has adopted a particular and dominant, but highly contested, theory of private law. It is the theory that private law is not private at all; it is part and parcel of government regulation, or "public law in disguise." Part I is a brief overview of how that jurisprudential view came to be, as well as a sketch of a competing view of private law as individual justice. In Part II, we brief...
Free Speech at What Cost?: Snyder v. Phelps and Speech-Based Tort Liability
2010
It is always a hard case when fundamental interests collide, but the Fourth Circuit’s decision in Snyder v. Phelps, 580 F.3d 206 (4th Cir. 2009), cert. granted, 130 S. Ct. 1737 (2010), tilts doctrine too far in the direction of free speech, upsetting the Supreme Court’s careful weighing of interests that takes into account both the need for robust political
Snyder v. Phelps: The U.S. Supreme Court's Tragic Erasure of the Tragic Spectacular
On March 2, 2011 the U.S. Supreme Court determined in Snyder v. Phelps that protests by members of Westboro Baptist Church, a small group of religious fundamentalists committed to communicating their beliefs publicly in spectacular fashion, were protected under the First Amendment based on a dual standard of "public concern;" that is, their speech dealt with sociopolitical issues and their speech attracted media attention. This rhetorical conflation of sociopolitical issues with subjects of media interest provides legal encouragement for the creation of media spectacles on the part of hate groups and other ideologues and discourages the development of the very public reason taken for granted by the Court. To defend this claim, we first provide a brief history of the Westboro Church and its strategic manipulation of the mass media and free speech law, situated within competing traditions of public sphere theory. After next providing a history of the judicial evolution of Snyder v. Phelps, we engage in a close
Marquette Law Review, 2015
There are increasing tensions between the First Amendment and the common-law torts of intentional infliction of emotional distress, defamation, and privacy. This Article discusses the conflicting interactions among the three models that are competing for primacy as the tort law governing expressive activities evolves to accommodate the requirements of the First Amendment. At one extreme there is the model that expression containing information which has been lawfully obtained that contains neither intentional falsehoods nor incitements to immediate violence can only be sanctioned in narrowly defined exceptional circumstances, even if that expression involves matters that are universally regarded as being of no public interest. At the other extreme is the model that some expression which, though lawfully obtained, reveals to a wider audience intimate private information about another should be subject to sanction, as should verbal abuse of a private figure even if there is no implici...
Method and Morality in the New Private Law of Torts
The just-christened New Private Law is especially intriguing, for it self-consciously aspires to draw insight from both instrumentalism and formalism. In his ambitious and illuminating "Palsgraf, Punitive Damages, and Preemption," for example, Benjamin Zipursky could not be any more forthright in combining instrumentalist and formalist themes. On his view, the New Private Law’s methodology is sensitive to both the functions and the concepts internal to law. Thus the New Private Law promises to be the elusive third way. And in Zipursky’s hands, it seems to me, the New Private Law of Torts makes good on that promise, offering a sound approach to the adjudication of vexing questions at the frontier of tort law. But Zipursky nevertheless falters in eschewing consideration of the approach’s moral foundations. In addition to explicating just what a commitment to the New Private Law of Torts comes to, then, it is the aim of this essay to assess where normative and specifically mo...
Can. JL & Jurisprudence, 2004
Against the background of the ECtHR's recent decision in Appleby v UK (a European "counterpart" to the well-known US Supreme Court decision in Marsh v Alabama) the paper addresses, first, the issue of the influence, often perceived as dilemmatic, of human rights norms and constitutional norms on private law. In a second step, then, the paper discusses the promise-and a possible dilemma-of "comparative constitutionalism" as an engine of a more denationalized "constitutional patriotism": the dilemma that we trade the "closure" of domestic exceptionalism against the new, systemic "closure" of "too much" judicial comity and professionalism, the closure of a new Juristenrecht.