Earlier this morning, the Supreme Court issued their opinion on Mahanoy v. B.L. In an 8–1 ruling, the Justices decided that the Mahanoy Area School District violated the First Amendment rights of B.L. The case revolved around B.L., a cheerleader, who was removed from…
Yesterday, the U.S. Supreme Court heard the oral arguments for Mahanoy Area School District v. B.L. This potential landmark case concerns the First Amendment rights of students in public schools. The main argument of the case is whether the Tinker decision from…
2026 Update: Please note that the opinion in Pico was supported by what is known as a plurality of the justices on the Supreme Court – in other words, it did not receive a majority vote, so it is not in…
Editorial Note: This article originally appeared on CreatorLaw.com. Due the complex nature of obscenity laws, we thought it would be interesting for CBLDF readers to get further insight into what these standards mean. To understand how the complexity can be…
In recent months, free speech within schools has come to the forefront as districts abandoned their own policies for reviewing educational materials; efforts to ban books have increased; and, in one instance, a student was arrested after refusing to recite the pledge of…
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 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…
Today, the Supreme Court unanimously struck down portions of the Lanham Act, and supported an Asian-American band’s right to an “offensive” trademark. When the activist Asian-American rock band decided on a name that both affirms their racial identity and reclaims a racist…
The Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case Lee v. Tam this week, with most justices who spoke evincing at least some skepticism of the federal government’s argument that it may deny trademarks deemed to be “disparaging.” CBLDF last…
Five years ago this month, the Supreme Court decided in Brown v. EMA that a California law banning the sale of violent video games to minors was unconstitutional. Like every relatively new medium before them — comics in the 1950s,…