Monday October 25, 2004
12:30 – 1:30 p.m.
Room 180
Free and Open to all!
Lunch Served
Paladin Press publishes a contract murder manual. A Web site operator is sued for linking to copyrighted material, or describing an algorithm for breaking copy protection. A Web page operator is prosecuted for posting bombmaking information. A computer programmer is sued or prosecuted for publicizing holes in a security system. A political activist group is sued for publishing the names and addresses of abortion providers, boycott violators, or police officers. The government issues a secret subpoena under the Patriot Act.
All these cases, and many more, turn out to be special cases of a general problem: How should First Amendment law treat "crime-facilitating speech," defined as (1) any communication that, (2) intentionally or not, (3) conveys information that (4) makes it easier or safer for some listeners or readers to (a) commit crimes, torts, acts of war, or suicide, or (b) to get away with committing such acts? Surprisingly, scholars have not focused much on these broad questions, and the Supreme Court has never squarely confronted them either in their general form or in their specific applications. This talk, based on an article that will be published early next year in the Stanford Law Review, will discuss the issue, and suggest which proposals for dealing with it seem promising and which seem inadequate.Eugene Volokh is visiting at Stanford Law School from UCLA, where he teaches free speech law, copyright law, the law of government and religion, and a seminar on firearms regulation policy. Before coming to UCLA, he clerked for Justice Sandra Day O'Connor on the U.S. Supreme Court and for Judge Alex Kozinski on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
Volokh also worked for 12 years as a computer programmer, and is still partner in a small software company which sells HP 3000 software that he wrote. He is the author of nearly 50 law review articles and over 70 op-eds on a wide range of topics, but mostly on First Amendment law, and of textbooks on the First Amendment and on Academic Legal Writing. He is the founder and coauthor of The Volokh Conspiracy, a Weblog that gets about 10,000 unique visitors per weekday.