please complete according to instructions and answer the numbered questions.
Question Description
Assignment 1: Media Law Treasure Hunt
Media Law Treasure Hunt Questions Objective: To introduce students to significant First Amendment cases while practicing the basic legal research skills that they will need for this course. There are many good online gateways for doing legal research on the web. One of the most popular ones is Findlaw.com. Use the internet to find legal databases with the answers to the following five questions. Each question has a specific answer worth five points. Questions 1. Courts are frequently asked to rule in wrongful death, negligence, and product liability lawsuits whether a media artifact like a film or recording played some part in inciting the perpetrator of the crime to commit illegal acts. To determine liability in such cases, courts often use the Brandenburg test for incitement to violence. What is the Brandenburg test? 2. Americans did not always have the right to publish criticisms of the president. The governor of New York secured an indictment of seditious libel against the colonial printer John Peter Zenger for publishing newspaper articles criticizing him. Sedition is overt conduct, such as speech and organization, that is deemed by the legal authority to tend toward insurrection against the established order; if the statement is in writing or some other permanent form it is seditious libel (Pember and Calvert, 2010). At that time in history and based on English common law, truth was not a considered a defense against accusations of seditious libel. The law of sedition had long held that the defendant was not to be permitted to argue their offending words against the government were true. In fact, the truth was considered to aggravate the offense, for it was more likely than falsehood to cause the aggrieved party to seek violent revenge and breach the peace. Furthermore, the law gave juries only a minor role in sedition trials: jurors were to decide whether the accused had, indeed, printed the words. It was up to judges to decide whether they were illegal words (Nelson and Teeter, 1973). Philadelphia lawyer Alexander Hamilton urged the jurors to recognize truth as a defense for Zenger, and argued that juries should decide “the law”—in this case, the libelousness of the words—as well as the fact of printing. He urged the jurors to acquit Zenger, which they did. What is the principle about freedom of expression for which this landmark case laid the groundwork? 3. Philosopher and educator Alexander Meiklejohn presented a set of ideas about an hierarchical approach to freedom of expression as a means to an end in the 1940s that considered political speech the most important to protect. That end is successful self-government, or as Meiklejohn put it, “the voting of wise decisions.” He said freedom of speech and press are protected in the U.S. Constitution so that the U.S. system of democracy can function, and that is the only reason they are protected. Expression that relates to the self-governing process is protected absolutely by the First Amendment, Meiklejohn said, while other forms of expression must be balanced by the courts against other rights and values. This notion of a marketplace of ideas was introduced in First Amendment case law in whose dissent to Abrams v United States? 4. What is the name of the broad SCOTUS decision that was used as the establishment of a general test for determining whether a device with copying or recording capabilities ran afoul of copyright law? 5. What is the citation for Reno v ACLU (1974) and what did the U.S. Supreme Court decide? |
Have a similar assignment? "Place an order for your assignment and have exceptional work written by our team of experts, guaranteeing you A results."