A new bill filed with the Florida State Legislature would allow schools to develop their own standards for education, presuming they are equal to or more rigorous than the state’s standards. Also within the bill, SB303 is a condition that…
Category: Legal
VA Rejects Bill Protecting Students’ First Amendment Rights
The Virginia legislature rejected HB 2382, a bill protecting the First Amendment rights of student journalists, on Monday after the House Education Subcommittee produced a tie vote. The bill was written to return K – 12 and public colleges and…
Changes to Freedom of Information Act Would Inhibit Access
American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom Blog has sounded the alarm that the Freedom of Information Act is under attack. At the end of December in 2018, the Interior Department proposed changes to the policy for requesting information that…
Upset Parent Proposes Legislation to Combat Books They Don’t Like
A lawmaker in Maine is using her position of power to attack students’ intellectual freedom and restrict the books available to her son and his peers in public schools in the state. Amy Arata, elected in 2018 as a state…
Jeffrey Brown Creates 2019 CBLDF Member Art!
4 Years After “Je Suis Charlie” – Are We?
This week marked the 4th anniversary of the gruesome Charlie Hedbo attack, where two brothers, Saïd and Chérif Kouachi, forced their way into the newspaper’s office and killed 12 people, injuring 11 more. At the time of the tragedy, the…
Supreme Court Rejects Petition from Prison Legal News
On Monday, January 7th the Supreme Court rejected a First Amendment dispute over the Florida Department of Corrections statewide ban of Prison Legal News (PLN), a magazine distributed monthly by Human Rights Defense Center. The ban has been in place…
The Free Speech Century – Examining the Great American Experiment
The First Amendment, ratified in 1791, is by no means new. But as the recent book The Free Speech Century points out, it was largely uninterpreted until three landmark decisions came down from the Supreme Court in 1919 – marking…
Netflix Complies With Censorship Request from Saudi Arabia
According to a Financial Times article, Netflix recently removed an episode of Patriot Act with Hassan Minhaj that was critical of Saudi Arabia after the kingdom threatened the episode was in breach of their internet cyber-crimes laws. The episode in…