#GAWKER SUCKS TRIAL#
Putting aside Chemerinsky’s bizarre suggestion that a local Tampa trial verdict “ establishes” anything, this sort of myopic reaction is shocking. “I don’t think it goes any further than that and I do not see a First Amendment basis for claiming that there is a right to do this.” “I think this case establishes a very limited proposition: It is an invasion of privacy to make publicly available a tape of a person having sex without that person’s consent,” he said. If Friday’s decision stands, he said, “that could be bad for the future of sex tapes, but I’m not sure it would be a threat to anything else.”Īnd Erwin Chemerinsky, ultra-progressive dean of UC, Irvine law school, said:
“This was an unusual and extremely private matter,” Mr. Freeman is a former assistant general counsel of The New York Times Company. “I think the damages are crazy, but I just don’t see this as a terrible blow to the First Amendment,” said George Freeman, the executive director of the Media Law Resource Center, a trade association of law firms and media companies, including Gawker Media. The question was posed to some academics (insufferably described in the headline as “legal experts”), who didn’t seem too concerned. Given what many expressed on twitter, they have their finger on the pulse of society.īut what’s the big deal? What’s so terrible about a ridiculously huge judgment against a ridiculously hated website like Gawker.
I submit that they know damn well what’s wrong with their argument, but also think you’re too stupid to realize the fallacy, so they can achieve their political goal of silencing speech they find distasteful, undignified, of low value, while manipulating the clueless. The irrationality of such a scheme never seems to be recognized if I think your speech is too, like really, just, you know, then I get to shut you up, because, literally. The non-legal consensus these days is that each of us gets to be censor of the universe, deciding the value of speech for everyone else.
#GAWKER SUCKS FREE#
Think it’s icky? Then it’s not free speech. Like something? Then it should be free speech. The first fear was that the verdict, indeed the very fact that there was a trial, reinforces the general belief that free speech and press is only as much of a right as people’s sensibilities feel it should be. Gawker sucks and it’s hypocritical, so who cares? There’s a constitutional right to privacy. The First Amendment doesn’t protect revenge porn. You can’t yell fire in a crowded theater.
On the other, the usual assortment of non-lawyer (and some lawyer) stupidity about the First Amendment. On the one side, there was the Schadenfreude, coming from surprising sources. Within minutes of the verdict being announced, an astounding $115,000,000 awarded Hulk Hogan in compensatory damages, with the jury returning to consider punitive damages, the reactions began.
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