#conlaw

[katierosefun]

not me randomly thinking about star wars for the first time in [checks calendar] four and a half months, but. isn’t it so fucked up that ahsoka really looked up to anakin and was able to admit that maybe he’s got some faults but she loves him and she sees him in a way that i don’t think anakin anticipated being seen and ahsoka only reveals that when she’s walking away from him and you see the dull shock on anakin’s face when he realizes that ahsoka had known the entire goddamn time and don’t you think it’s so fucked up that anakin was so excited to see ahsoka again but ahsoka’s grown even more now and she’s got things to do and she brushes him aside and don’t you think it’s so fucked up that at twenty three years old, anakin’s still asking ahsoka to stay don’t you think it’s so fucked up and tragic and sad that anakin’s the one who consistently asks ahsoka to stay he didn’t even want her at first and now he doesn’t ever want her to leave don’t you think it’s so sad and fucked up that the last time ahsoka sees anakin, he gives her this small smile that turns into the familiar, happy one that we’ve seen earlier in the show don’t you think it’s so sad and fucked up that ahsoka watches him leave that time too don’t you think it’s so fucked up that you can go from knowing someone so well to not knowing them at all don’t you think it’s so

[superfluouskeys]

extremely horrific that in order to perceive moira o’deorain i would have to play overwatch. 

[feeshies]

Rip my back (that’s not rest in piece. That’s the sound my spine is going to make from carrying these back and forth every day)

[note-a-bear]

The thing about that 'why did they have to fight for women's rights' post is every time it pops up on my dash I have a violent flashback to being in undergrad and someone saying basically that. I genuinely can't remember if I said it or if someone else did but the response was an immediate 'if not for them you couldn't sit in this room and be ignorant'

[socialistexan]

I am almost certain this violates some kind of interstate law. You have to be able to travel between states without documents or impediment.

Iirc it's included in the Privileges and Immunities clause of the Constitution (I'd have to check, it's been about a decade since my last ConLaw class)

This might cause an actual Constitutional crisis. That's actually kind of a big deal.

[visenyaism]

Hey! Love to read your analysis of asoiaf

Which targaryen do you think would make badass lawyers? Wha area of law do you think they would be working?

not many. i feel like it requires a combination of being combative and being stable and being a nerd which fits few members of the blood death conquest monarchy family tbh. that being said:

-rhaena the lesbian does evil powersuit biglaw

-jaehaerys i got a JD to be an asshole about it but does not actually use it

-viserys i extremely terrible constitutional law prof. i guess daemon was technically the DA of kings landing. jesus christ.

-daeron ii marginally better conlaw prof

-elaena private equity shark

-bloodraven was basically on that villainous DA-> supervillanous AG -> archvillainous US senator pipeline already. the riverlands dream. 

-egg would be a nepo baby public defender until it’s time to get a real job and take up the family senate seat

-honorable mention 1/4 targaryen stannis baratheon who was put on this earth to be a tax attourney and got forced to do everything else instead

[vonnegutcunt]

this conlaw textbook keeps trying to push this idea that people loooove arbitrarily sueing police because they think it's lucrative and ik I live in my leftie-lib bubble but this feels like something completely made up that could hardly be considered a "trend". but maybe that's just me

[katierosefun]

dropping a fic and then scrambling to delete all social media off my phone and silencing email notifications and immediately finding a mind-sucking activity to do to keep myself from obsessively checking for comments/kudos is. definitely a way to keep myself from imploding

[vivaciousoceans]

The first brief I have to write for conlaw is over McCulloch v. Maryland which I actually have written a brief over, but in highschool

[superfluouskeys]

i'm soooooooo hype for thanksgiving break lol like im still gonna be in paper writing hell but i don't have to worry about anything OTHER than that you know

[mariacallous]

Texas can enforce a law requiring age-verification systems on porn websites, the US Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit ruled Thursday. The appeals court vacated an injunction against the law's age-verification requirement but said that Texas cannot enforce a provision requiring porn websites to "display health warnings about the effects of the consumption of pornography."

In a 2-1 decision, judges ruled that "the age-verification requirement is rationally related to the government's legitimate interest in preventing minors' access to pornography. Therefore, the age-verification requirement does not violate the First Amendment."

The Texas law was challenged by the owners of Pornhub and other adult websites and an adult-industry lobby group called the Free Speech Coalition. "We disagree strenuously with the analysis of the Court majority," the Free Speech Coalition said. "As the dissenting opinion by Judge [Patrick] Higginbotham makes clear, this ruling violates decades of precedent from the Supreme Court."

A US District Court judge issued a preliminary injunction blocking enforcement of the law in August 2023, finding that "Plaintiffs have shown that their First Amendment rights will likely be violated if the statute takes effect, and that they will suffer irreparable harm absent an injunction."

But a few weeks later, the 5th Circuit issued a temporary stay that allowed the law to take effect in September 2023. The new ruling issued last week was on the merits of the preliminary injunction.

Court Cites Magazine Precedent

The 5th Circuit, generally regarded as one of the most conservative appeals courts, found that the Texas porn-site law should be reviewed on the "rational-basis" standard and not under strict scrutiny. The court panel majority pointed to Ginsberg v. New York, a 1968 Supreme Court ruling about the sale of "girlie" magazines to a 16-year-old at a lunch counter. The Supreme Court in that case upheld a New York criminal obscenity statute that prohibited the knowing sale of obscene materials to minors.

The same principle applies to the internet, the 5th Circuit majority found. "Because it is never obvious whether an Internet user is an adult or a child, any attempt to identify the user will implicate adults in some way... To suggest protecting children would be so difficult is inconsistent with Ginsberg, where rational basis review was sufficient even though adults would presumably have to identify themselves to buy girlie magazines," the ruling said.

As Santa Clara University law professor Eric Goldman wrote, the 5th Circuit "panel majority claims the 56-year-old Ginsberg opinion, which dealt with offline retailers, governs the Conlaw [constitutional law] analysis of the Texas law instead of the squarely on-point 1997 Reno v. ACLU and 2004 Ashcroft v. ACLU opinions, both of which dealt with the Internet."

In his dissent, Judge Higginbotham said the majority's attempts to distinguish Ginsberg from later rulings "are unconvincing." Although "Ginsberg remains good law and indubitably recognizes the government's power to protect children from age-inappropriate materials," the Supreme Court "has unswervingly applied strict scrutiny to content-based regulations that limit adults' access to protected speech," he wrote.

The Texas law "limits access to materials that may be denied to minors but remain constitutionally protected speech for adults," Higginbotham wrote. "It follows that the law must face strict scrutiny review because it limits adults' access to protected speech using a content-based distinction—whether that speech is harmful to minors."

Section 230 Analysis Flawed, Professor Says

The 5th Circuit panel majority found that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act does not preempt the Texas law. Goldman called the decision "another entry in the Fifth Circuit's increasingly unstable Section 230 jurisprudence."

Goldman said that judges seem to be saying "that the age authentication mandate only regulates the services' conduct, and thus it doesn't impose liability for third-party content... However, fundamentally, the statute imposes liability for services for publishing third-party content to underage viewers, and Section 230 clearly should apply to that aspect."

Goldman expects this case or similar ones to reach the Supreme Court:

This opinion will be appealed to the Supreme Court, alongside other cases over statutes imposing mandatory age authentication. The pro-censorship forces have been angling for an opportunity to challenge Reno v. ACLU and the COPA [Child Online Protection Act] caselaw, hoping that the Supreme Court will forget or overturn that precedent. This highlights the stakes of this and the other cases on their way to SCOTUS: do the foundational Constitutional law principles that have fostered the Internet's success over the past 25+ years still apply, or have the rules since changed and opened the door to rampant government censorship? The Internet's fate–and perhaps the fate of free speech in our country–hangs in the balance.

The Texas law also creates privacy problems, Higginbotham wrote in his dissent. It "prohibits commercial entities and third parties performing age verification from retaining identifying information, but the bill imposes no burden on governmental entities nor 'any intermediary between the commercial websites and the third-party verifiers' to do the same. Simply claiming that the 'age verification preserves online anonymity' does not make it so," he wrote.

Platforms Could Be Sued by Texas AG

In the meantime, the Free Speech Coalition said that "platforms that do not implement age verification measures will be at risk of prosecution by the Attorney General, as has been the case since the Fifth Circuit stayed the preliminary injunction last September."

The law applies to websites in which more than one-third of the content "is sexual material harmful to minors." Those websites must "use reasonable age verification methods" to limit their material to adults.

The one bit of good news for websites that challenged the law is the 5th Circuit's finding that the requirement to display health warnings about pornography "unconstitutionally compel[s] speech" and cannot be enforced.

"The warnings declare the potential harm of minors' engaging with pornography, and they do so in a noticeable fashion—in a way likely to discourage minors from using and adults from allowing their children to use the websites," the court wrote.

Government bodies seeking to restrict commercial speech must show that the restrictions will alleviate a harm to a material degree. Texas failed that test, the court said: “Because Texas has not made such a showing, we adopt the approach recently taken by the Ninth Circuit: '[C]ompelling sellers to warn consumers of a potential 'risk' never confirmed by any regulatory body—or of a hazard not 'known' to more than a small subset of the scientific community—does not directly advance' the government's interest.”

[wilsonthemoose]

If you are still writing for Suits, a Harvey/Scottie drabble for when they first meet? Please we are starving for fic for this ship

The first time she sees him outside of class, he's sitting on the nearest bench and one of her heels is about to fall off. She tosses her bag down next to him, leans on the back of the bench and takes her shoes off, resigned to barefooting it back to her dorm.

He takes an earphone off, edges the little finger of his hand minutely away from the strap of her bag, and never says a word.

"Headbanging stuff?" she asks, with no memory of his name and a very clear memory of his argument in conlaw the week before.

Later, she'd reflect on how very apt it was, that word for the two of them. How very apt it all was: his ear to something else, cold seeping through the soles of her feet. His hand withdrawing from her bag, and him two seconds from running to his dorm and fetching a pair of bathroom slippers for her. And she'd reflect that it was always quit pro quo with him, ("If you'll have dinner with me.")

"Duke Ellington," he says, then looks at her bare feet on the pavement and the heels in her hand, "Trouble?"

[ceterisparibus116]

if youre just getting into learning abt constitutional law, where do you recommend starting? i took apush last year and remember some of it, and I’ve written about some cases for journalism. but where do you think is a good starting point for high schoolers—as in books, specific cases, or online lectures?

I LOVE that you've written cases for journalism! That's so cool!

And this is a great question! Constitutional law is a pretty huge area of law. You have everything from the cases that most obviously affect a lot of us (like about marriage and family, religion, etc.), to the cases that also really affect us but in more subtle ways (like the commerce clause).

The tricky thing about ConLaw is that each of these fields are pretty distinct. You have some overarching tests (and researching "strict scrutiny vs intermediate scrutiny vs rational basis" will give you information on those overarching tests), but you also have tests that, like, only apply to instances when government is encroaching on religion, or tests that only apply to freedom of speech issues.

So I guess really, it's a question of how far in you want to zoom or how far out. Do you want something broad that gives you some general info on all the topics, or do you want to become, like, an expert on free speech?

Anyway, all that being said, my absolute favorite resource are the "in a nutshell" books. So for you, that'd be Constitutional Law In A Nutshell. I love it! It explains all the concepts and all the vocabulary and gives you the main cases that everyone knows (or pretends to know, lol).

You could also look for youtube videos by searching for things like "Constitutional law quimbee" (quimbee is a widely-used resource in law school) or "Constitutional law kaplan" or "Constitutional law barbri" (because Kaplan and Barbri are two common bar prep courses). Or if you want to know about a specific topic, you could google "free speech quimbee/kaplan/barbri" and see what comes up. It looks like youtube has some lectures and videos that have been posted from these sources.

Other than that, I could, idk, dm you my constitutional law notes? I'd be happy to do that if you're interested. My studies were based on the nutshell book, my textbook, my professor, and my notes, so I just wasn't really one to explore other resources.

I hope this helps! And good luck with your research!

[cyllofern]

hi guys i may lose my mind in this conlaw class, thetwo people in front of me KEEP TALKING

[atxvanhalen]

I DO NOT WANT TO WRITE THIS CONLAW PAPER

[katierosefun]

drinking my silly fun coffee drink in the cafe but surrounded by my casebooks + notes . . . drinking my silly fun coffee drink like i’m drinking at the bar instead (limp wrist, tired-annoyed-i-have-seen-things expression)