Category Archives: Free Speech

Students may soon have clearer guidelines for how they can exercise speech on campus.

With several high-profile cases nationwide and at the University of Minnesota, the Student Representatives to the Board of Regents want the University to clarify its policies on campus free speech.

Free speech on college campuses has become a hot-button issue across the country the issue is already affecting our University, student representatives to the board Vice Chair Mike Kenyanya said Friday at the regents meeting.

While University President Eric Kaler has stated his commitment to free speech on campus, to make the Universitys policies clearer, the student representatives want the University to make a comprehensive, system-wide policy on student free speech by fall 2018.

They also want the school to see whether current policies need changes and if students need more free speech resources.

The student representatives also say they want regents to consult free speech statements already made by the Council of Graduate Students and the Faculty Consultative Committee.

They also want a central source of information, like a website, on free speech policies by fall 2018.

At the University, incidents like the 2015 arrest of student protesters in Morrill Hall and the 2016 vandalism of the College Republicans Build the Wall panel of the Washington Avenue Bridge, among others, led to discussions over the limit of free speech on campus.

At the meeting, Regent Darrin Rosha said the 2018 deadline was too distant. He said six months to a year would likely suffice or the project may lose momentum due to student leader turnover.

But Kenyanya said he wants enough time to ensure a comprehensive policy for all system campuses.

Nicholas Goldsmith, president of COGS, said above all, the University needs a unified policy, and a full consultative process is in order.

The University shouldnt mimic other colleges policies, he said, but instead should create one that reflects the Universitys unique history and values.

Dane Thompson, vice president of Professional Student Government, said a revision of current policies would help identify gaps caused by a lack of precedent or specific language that otherwise would go unnoticed.

Jane Kirtley, director of the Universitys Silha Center for the Study of Media Ethics and Law and a journalism and law professor, said the best way to combat free speech is with more speech.

When we drive speech and expression underground, we only encourage it, she said.

She said students need to know they are subject to the first amendment but many may not know the University can make time, place and manner restrictions.

Kirtley, Rosha and Thompson said they support the creation of a resource or website to list students free speech rights, but said they worried it may be lost among other links on the Universitys website.

[These policies] should be readily accessible, and it is sometimes very difficult to navigate the Universitys website, Kirtley said.

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Student leaders suggests improvements for UMN free speech policies - Minnesota Daily

March 30, 2017 11:16 AM

Kevin Shaw says First Amendment rights are under attack on campus. (Photo credit: Dawn Bowery/FIRE)

WOODLAND HILLS (CBSLA.com) A Los Angeles Pierce College student says he was prohibited from passing out copies of the U.S. Constitution outside the campus free speech zone.

A lawsuit filed by student Kevin Shaw against Pierce College and the Los Angeles Community College District (LACCD) alleges Shaws constitutional rights were violated in Nov. 2016 when was told he could not distribute literature outside designated spaces on campus.

Shaw says his goal on that day was to pass out Spanish-language copies of the Constitution along the main public walkway through the heart of Pierce College and recruit new members for his student group, Young Americans for Liberty.

The campus free speech zone, meanwhile, is comprised of a tiny area on campus measuring approximately 616 square feet and comprising about .003 percent of the total area of Pierce Colleges 426-acre campus, according to the lawsuit.

For perspective, if Pierce College were the size of a tennis court, the area where students are allowed to exercise their constitutional rights would be smaller than a standard iPhone, said Nico Perrino, spokesperson for the nonprofit Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), which helped file the complaint.

Attorneys say Shaw was also told he was required to fill out a permit application to use the free speech zone, and that he would be asked to leave campus if he refused to comply.

When I attempted to hand out copies of the Constitution that day, my only intention was to get students thinking about our founding principles and to inspire discussion of liberty and free speech, Shaw said in a statement. I had no idea I would be called upon to defend those very ideals against Pierces unconstitutional campus policies. This fight is about a students right to engage in free thinking and debate while attending college in America.

In response to the lawsuit, LACCD consultant Yusef Robb released the following statement: The Los Angeles Community College District firmly stands behind every students right to free expression.

The LACCD free speech zone policy mirrors similar policies in place at community colleges and universities across the U.S. that have increasingly come under scrutiny from some lawmakers, who say such policies may actually have a chilling effect on student speech.

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Pierce College Student Alleges Constitution Not Allowed To Be Distributed Outside 'Free Speech Zone' - CBS Los Angeles

New York Times

Campuses Grapple With Balancing Free Speech and Security After Protests New York Times The university expressed support for free speech, while emphasizing that Mr. Spencer's remarks at one point he said that America belongs to white men did not reflect its values, said Amy B. Smith, a university spokeswoman. It also had to ...

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Campuses Grapple With Balancing Free Speech and Security After Protests - New York Times

GPSG holds an event to discuss the challenges of free speech in modern America.

By Madeleine Neal

madeleine-neal@uiowa.edu

When it comes to the First Amendment, University of Iowa Student Government President Rachel Zuckerman said understanding free speech is one of the issues in which she has matured the most over the past year.

The Graduate and Professional Student Government, UISG, University Lecture Committee, IMU, and the Presidents Office presented an all-day event about the First Amendment in Modern America Tuesday in the IMU. Zuckerman said dialogue about the First Amendment is important.

[It is] so important to have robust dialogue, she said. Students [must] feel safe.

The issue, she said, is what happens when dialogue and student safety do not mix.

[Theres] never a perfect answer, she said. [But] the things people [say] have real effects.

Zuckerman said she believes it is important to remember that the people who made these laws have had immense privilege, although that is no reason to be upset with them.

However, she said, she does believe the privilege of those who wrote free-speech laws gives people a need to re-examine them.

In [my] opinion, its not right to knowingly reserve the right to [hurt] other people, she said.

The event featured Ana Navarro, a Republican strategist and political commentator, Paul Gowder, a UI professor of law, Christina Bohannan, a UI professor of law, Laura Kipnis, a professor at Northwestern University, David Ryfe, a UI professor of jounalism, Jamelle Bouie, a chief political correspondent for Slate, and Franchesca Ramsey, a comedian and video blogger.

Bouie said the issue of free speech is not just a matter of getting offended.

[We cannot] give legitimacy to ideas that exist in a society when there is racial oppression, he said. We dont need to live in that kind of society.

Bouie said he believes the solution lies in civil society.

As it stands, I think were too loosey goosey when it comes to racist ideas, he said. [Were] too tolerant of public figures who make racist comments.

Bouie said he thinks society needs to have swifter responses.

Community members, he said, should know that drawing a swastika on a wall will result in the appropriate community response.

When [responses] dont exist, there can be a feeling of alienation, he said.

UI sophomore Sriven Kadiyala, however, said he thinks free speech on college campuses is a positive thing, but there needs to be a distinction between free speech and hate speech.

This is a blurry line, Kadiyala said. And so a lot of confusion surrounds it.

He said he believes that the more views that we are exposed to in a safe place, the more attuned students can become to the different people in the real world.

This will eventually lead us to become more tolerant individuals, he said. [Although] this is not to say that we must be tolerant of everything, but we must be able to accept someones opinions as nothing but that, and practicing free speech on campuses helps with that.

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Free speech holds the day in the IMU - The Daily Iowan

The Colleges Office of BGLTQ Student Life reaffirmed its support for transgender students ahead of a scheduled campus visit Thursday from an anti-transgender Free Speech Bus.

Co-sponsored by conservative action groups the National Organization for Marriage, Citizen Go, and the International Organization for the Family, the bus is intended to to promote a renewed policy debate [on transgender issues] that tries to accommodate for everyone, according to Joseph Grabowski, director of communications for the National Organization for Marriage. The vehicle will travel to Boston and Harvards campus on Thursday as part of its larger tour through the East Coast.

Featured prominently on the side of the bus, in bold-letter font, are the words: Its Biology: Boys are boys and always will be. Girls are girls... and always will be. You cant change sex.

In response to the buss scheduled visit, the BGLTQ Office hosted a banner signing event Tuesday afternoon, where students stopped by the Offices Linden St. quarters and added their names to a sign reading Trans Lives Matter. The banner will be hung in the Science Center Plaza Thursday, according to Sheehan D. Scarborough 07, the director of the office.

We'll be hanging the banner in the Science Center Plaza as a visible message of support for the trans community at Harvard andto provide a counter-message to the rhetoric offered by the bus, Scarborough wrote in an emailed statement Tuesday.

Scarborough also emailed a Message of Support to BGLTQ undergraduates over the weekend.

Whether or not this bus shows up on campus this week, we will still be here, Scarborough wrote. Our lives are the punctuation mark on this debate, because at the end of the day, queer, and trans, and gender non-binary people exist.

No message on a bus can cast a shadow on the radiant spectrum of light that is the awesome diversity of our human experience, Scarborough added.

Adams House BGLTQ resident tutors prepared for the Free Speech Bus by hosting a supportive space for students to come together Tuesday evening.

As of late Tuesday afternoon, the Trans Lives Matter banner had garnered more than 80 student and administrator signatures. Lily M. Velona 18, who signed the banner, said, I think its terribleits purposeful that this bus is calling itself a Free Speech Bus.

Ive been seeing lot of this as of late, where people are conflating free speech and hate speech, Velona added. Hate speech is not protected speech. Its not free speech. No one has the right to use hate speech.

Benjamin M. Kruteck 19, who also signed the banner, said he chose to add his name because he wanted to show support for his transgender peers.

Its a sense of being, being trans is a sense of being, and so its important to support people in who they are and I dont understand why anyone wouldnt, Kruteck said. So for me its important to sign because I want to represent the fact that I support people being who they are.

Staff writer Hannah Natanson can be reached at hannah.natanson@thecrimson.com. Follow her on Twitter @hannah_natanson.

Staff writer Derek G. Xiao can be reached at derek.xiao@thecrimson.com. Follow him on Twitter @derekgxiao.

Trans Activism and Mourning

Today, the 20th of November, marks the 5th annual Transgender Day of Remembrance. Founded in honor of Rita Hester, who

BGLTQ Student Life Director Steps Down

Soul on the Line: Sheehan D. Scarborough '07 and his Office of BGLTQ Student Life

College Faith Groups Address Intersection of Religion, Sexuality

Khurana Says Protecting Transgender Rights is Right Thing To Do

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BGLTQ Office Prepares For Visit of Anti-Transgender 'Free Speech ... - Harvard Crimson

Tuesday, March 28, 2017 4:01 p.m. EDT

By Jonathan Stempel

(Reuters) - A former University of New Mexico student failed to persuade a federal appeals court that the school violated her free speech rights by rejecting an essay containing anti-lesbian remarks that she had written for a film class.

The 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Tuesday said the university had legitimate pedagogical concerns when its professors refused to grade Monica Pompeo's critique of a film about a lesbian romance and suggested that she rewrite it, prompting her withdrawal from the class in the spring of 2012.

Pompeo had written that the 1985 film, "Desert Hearts," could be viewed as "entirely perverse in its desire and attempt to reverse the natural roles of man and woman in addition to championing the barren wombs of these women."

Writing for a two-judge panel, Circuit Judge Carlos Lucero said Pompeo did not have an unfettered right to use language in a course assignment that professors might find offensive.

He said this meant the university and two professors who reviewed Pompeo's essay were not liable for damages for any alleged First Amendment violations.

"Teaching students to avoid inflammatory language when writing for an academic audience qualifies as a legitimate pedagogical goal," Lucero wrote. "Short of turning every classroom into a courtroom, we must entrust to educators these decisions that require judgments based on viewpoint."

Pompeo's lawyers did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

A university spokeswoman, Dianne Anderson, said in an email on behalf of the professors that the school was pleased that the decision "provides a more complete perspective on the facts" and affirms the lack of evidence of a free speech violation.

The university refunded Pompeo's tuition for the class, court records show.

Tuesday's decision by the Denver-based appeals court let stand a September 2015 ruling by Chief Judge M. Christina Armijo of the federal court in Albuquerque.

Circuit Judge Neil Gorsuch, the U.S. Supreme Court nominee of President Donald Trump, was originally part of the 10th Circuit panel but did not participate in Tuesday's decision.

The case is Pompeo v. Board of Regents of the University of New Mexico et al, 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, No. 15-2179.

(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; Editing by Tom Brown and Richard Chang)

Link:
New Mexico student loses free speech appeal over anti-lesbian essay - WHTC

OLYMPIA, Wash. (AP) A measure aimed to protect high school and college students rights to publish and speak freely in school-sponsored media did not make it out of the House Education Committee before a key Wednesday deadline.

Republican Sen. Joe Fain, the sponsor of Senate Bill 5064, wrote in a Facebook post Tuesday: While we are disappointed that the House of Representatives killed the legislation this afternoon, that too provides a valuable lesson on the uphill road that is the legislative process.

The bill would have allowed students to determine what content to publish in their publication or broadcast without any threat of censorship or peer review from school administrators. However, action could have been taken if any content contained libelous or slanderous material, or was obscene or incited students to commit unlawful acts on school grounds.

Similar bills have been filed in Vermont, Missouri and Indiana. Ten states in the U.S. currently have student speech protection laws, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

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Student free speech bill dies in Washington Legislature - Q13 FOX

Free-speech advocates look forward each year to the awarding of the Jefferson Muzzles by the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression in Charlottesville. This year marks the silver anniversary of the Muzzles and they will be announced in mid-April. (The announcement usually comes on or near Mr. Jeffersons birthday, April 13.)

This past weekend I had an opportunity to speak with Joshua Wheeler, director of the Thomas Jefferson Center, who had just moderated a panel discussion about words and language at the Virginia Festival of the Book. He gave me a preview of the 2017 Muzzles but few hints about the actual winners.

As every year, Wheeler said, youll see a variety of different kinds of censorship but youll also see that free speech or censorship, if you want to put it that way, is a non-partisan issue. It comes from the left as well as the right. No political point of view has a lock on it.

He cautioned that we need to remember that the First Amendment doesnt check censorship in all its forms. The First Amendment is a check on government censorship, and so whoever happens to be in the government at the time, theyre probably going to be getting the bulk of the Muzzles.

Fake News? I also asked Wheeler about the proliferation of the term fake news, especially since last years presidential election campaign. What comes to mind when he hears somebody say fake news?

What comes to mind for me is satire, but thats not how its being used, he replied. The way in which its being used by our current administration, which seems to have really coined the phrase, is claiming that news that they dont like is fake news.

Thats not the right way to use the term, he said.

I believe they have every right to find fault with journalism that they disagree with, that they think is not being correct, but, he averred, to call it fake news is very disturbing to me because its an attack on the institution of the press more than just any particular news outlet.

One form of fake news, I suggested, was the sort of phony news story created by Macedonian bloggers working in dank basements and then spread willy-nilly through social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. How, I asked, can social media protect itself against this kind of phenomenon?

Thats a very good question, said Wheeler. Im not exactly sure.

Pausing, he added that the key is us as individuals to read a variety of sources and only through that, I think, will we be able to get a filter of what actually is the truth and what is some sort of outlandish, demonstrably false information.

As for the criteria we can use to judge good sources from bad ones, Wheeler said that one of the things Ive learned in the last few years is [that] news can have a bias or a leaning one way or the other. There is a subjective element to the news.

Given that, he said, I think what we want to look for, though, is news reporters and news outlets that dont deliberately do that, that they are presenting what they see as the truth and we, again, as the public need to recognize that they are acting as a filter to us and theres always going to be a certain amount of interpretation.

The best way to judge good-vs-bad, he added, is not just to read or hear or listen to those news outlets that we know were going to agree with, but to challenge yourself and listen to some of those media outlets that present a different point of view.

The reason to listen to different points of view, he explained, is that sometimes by doing that you can recognize when theyre reporting the same facts but they might be reporting a slightly different interpretation of them and then we are left free to make our own interpretation.

Wheeler said he believes strongly in the phrase that youre entitled to your own opinion but youre not entitled to your own facts. What seems to concern me today is that so many people are relying on [or] are putting forth statements [or] are claiming facts when, in fact, theres no real evidence to prove that.

(In other words, alternative facts.)

Free-speech litigation Finally, I asked Wheeler whether there are any current legal cases involving free speech or free expression that deserve our attention. He mentioned one, in particular, Elonis v. United States, which has been sent back to a lower court from the U.S. Supreme Court for further review. A second case, pending before the Pennsylvania supreme court, Knox v. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, also brings up some interesting issues.

Its not at the Supreme Court yet, he said, but its an issue were going to a see more and more of, involving both Internet speech and the question what constitutes a true threat.

True threats, he explained, are one of those areas, categories of speech that are not protected by the First Amendment. The whole question before the courts, he said, is what constitutes a true threat.

The problem is, he noted, that when its on the internet, its particularly difficult to determine whether a threat is genuine (true) or not because a true threat has to be communicated to a particular person.

The confusion arises when a statement is not intended to be communicated towards a particular person but that person feels threatened by the statement. In that case, the question is whether the threat is defined by the intent of the speaker or by the perception of the person who feels threatened.

The questions before the court will be: Does the speaker have to intend to make you feel threatened? Or is it just enough that the listener, the person who hears it, is reasonable in feeling threatened by it?

The answers to those questions are the critical issue that the Supreme Court has yet to weigh in on. Theyve had a couple of chances and both times theyve sort of punted on that issue but its going to come up and its coming up in this case in Pennsylvania right now.

Words, words, words For the entertainment of Bearing Drift readers, here is the panel discussion led by Joshua Wheeler for the 2017 Virginia Festival of the Book. As recorded in the Charlottesville City Council chambers, two wordsmiths, Allan Metcalf (From Skedaddle to Selfie: Words of the Generations) and Robert Rubin (Going to Hell in a Hen Basket: An Illustrated Dictionary of Modern Malapropisms), discussed the steady addition of new words to the English language, and the equally steady new ways we find to misuse them.(Audience members had the opportunity to vote in the American Dialect Societys annual Word of the Year contest, and to suggest favorite malapropisms.) The panel was called Word Salad or Word Solid? Malapropisms and New Coinages.

Rick Sincere is a senior contributor for Bearing Drift.

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Bearing Drift Asks a Free-Speech Advocate About #FakeNews - Bearing Drift (press release) (blog)

Yasmine Akki, Columbia Daily Spectator

Charles Murray speaks on Thursday night at Columbia U. to a quiet audience. His talk three weeks ago at Middlebury College resulted in violence and roiled higher ed. What does it say that the reaction hasnt recurred?

"We can all relax now, nothing exciting is going to happen," Mr. Murray said at the opening of a talk here Thursday night at Columbia University that was devoid of the conflict that made his Middlebury visit national news.

His roughly 90-minute speech touched on class divisions and his argument that much of America was living in a bubble. A few protesters greeted Mr. Murray at the university, but he spoke without disruption just as he did on Tuesday at Duke University, his first campus stop since Middlebury.

An informal survey of the campus before the speech on Thursday revealed that many had heard about the Middlebury fracas, but not the man at the center of it.

That raises a critical and slippery question for colleges: Mr. Murray, white-haired and even-tempered, is no Milo Yiannopoulos, the flashy provocateur, and the last campus speaker whose presence whipped campuses into a frenzy nationwide. But in an age of charged politics and social-media overexposure, every speaker has the potential to go viral in a way that might be detrimental to colleges. How can they tell one from the other? Should they try?

Mr. Murray is best known for the 1994 book The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, in which he and Richard J. Herrnstein argue that genetics may be partly responsible for the achievement gap between white and black students. But he came to Columbia to talk about his 2012 book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 19602010. Mr. Murray is currently a scholar with the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think tank focused on public policy.

Chronicle photo by Chris Quintana

Protesters at Columbia U. speak out against an appearance on Thursday by the political scientist Charles Murray, whose 1994 book "The Bell Curve" asserts that genetics partly account for the achievement gap between white and black students.

The Middlebury College violence on March 2 left a professor injured in the scrum. The ripples of that incident have elevated Mr. Murray's prominence in recent days.

His visits to Duke and Columbia were his first speaking engagements since Middlebury. He will speak on Friday at New York University and next week at the University of Notre Dame and Villanova University.

A spokeswoman for AEI said Mr. Murray was not available for an interview with The Chronicle, and the political scientist slipped away from the stage quickly after Thursday's event concluded.

Jonathan Schatz-Mizrahi, a student organizer, arranged the Columbia lecture before the incident at Middlebury. Since then, he said, organizers have thought more about security and free-speech issues. But the attempt to silence speech at Middlebury, he said, actually emboldened his decision to bring Mr. Murray to Columbia.

Mr. Schatz-Mizrahi, a self-described conservative, said before the talk that he didn't think a protest would be a problem. And he was largely right. A group had announced plans to walk out of the talk at 8 p.m., but a large-scale departure didn't materialize. Rather people filed out one-by-one from the hot basement where the lecture was held. Dozens attended, and security was tight.

Mr. Schatz-Mizrahi was pleased with the turnout. "I don't think what he said was very controversial, but I think it was valuable," he said.

Some faculty members had urged in an open letter to the Columbia Daily Spectator that Mr. Murray be permitted to give his speech free of interruption. "Any attempt to obstruct Murray will be instantly weaponized by supporters of President Donald Trump into yet another reason to hate 'elitists' and to divert from the damage his regime intends," the letter stated.

"Although his writings carry the rhetorical patina of science, Murray is largely regarded in academic circles as a rank apologist for racial eugenics and racial inequality in the United States," they wrote. "Murray has every right to publicize his ideas, but we have a duty to object when he does so by assaulting foundational norms of sound scholarship and intellectual integrity."

An op-ed published Wednesday in the Spectator and signed by "Barnard Columbia Socialists" criticized Mr. Murray and urged that his ideas be confronted. "This is a moment that calls for us to use our right to free speech to challenge the widely discredited, racist, and profoundly elitist ideas of Charles Murray," they wrote.

Some activists created Facebook pages announcing plans to protest Mr. Murray at Columbia and inviting others to join them. Early this month at the affiliated Barnard College, someone defaced posters announcing the scholar's visit.

Mr. Murray largely avoided discussing race in his lecture on Thursday and instead focused on class division. The thrust of his argument was that the elites should live away from communities of their rich peers.

"I am just saying, get out of this claustrophobic class that you live in because maybe you'll love it and in the process learn to love America in the way which has been sadly reduced in recent years," Mr. Murray said.

Donald J. Trump, the elephant in the room during every campus political discussion, did not go unmentioned. Citing accusations of unpaid subcontractors on Mr. Trump's business projects, Mr. Murray offered his blunt opinion of the president. "I think he's a despicable man."

Chris Quintana is a breaking-news reporter. Follow him on Twitter @cquintanadc or email him at chris.quintana@chronicle.com.

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Subdued Reception for Controversial Scholar Shows Just How Fluky Free-Speech Flashpoints Can Be - Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription)

Ocheesee Creamery"The leftover product is skim milk: milk that has had the fat removed through skimming."

If those wordsfrom a unanimous 11th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling earlier this weeksound like some sort of dictawords in a court decision which represent a judge's ideas or observations but aren't part of the holding of the case and which, therefore, carry little legal weightthen it may surprise you to learn the question of whether all-natural skim milk is skim milk actually go to the heart of the case in question.

The case, Ocheesee Creamery v. Putnam, has its roots in 2012, when Florida's state agriculture department ordered Ocheesee, a small creamery in the state's panhandle, to stop selling its skim milk. The state claimed Ocheesee's skim milk ran afoul of Florida's standard of identity for skim milk, which requires creameries and dairies to add vitamin A to their skim milk.

In response, Ocheesee, which prides itself on its all-natural milks, proposed instead of introducing vitamin A additive to its milk to label its skim milk as "Pasteurized Skim Milk, No Vitamin A Added."

The state rejected that label, telling Ocheesee they could sell their skim milk only if it were labeled as "Non-Grade 'A' Milk Product, Natural Milk Vitamins Removed" or, later, as "imitation skim milk." For a state that argued it was in the business of protecting consumers, and that Ocheesee's use of the term "skim milk" to describe its skim milk (ingredients: skim milk) was misleading, it's worth noting both of Florida's recommended terms for a skim milk that contains only skim milk are patently and grossly misleading.

Ocheesee was forced to sue the state. Last year, the U.S. District Court sided with the Florida regulators.

The appeals court win this week is an important victory not just for Ocheesee Creamery but also for free speech, consumers, small businesses, and food freedom. It's also a big win for the Institute for Justice, which represented the plaintiff creamery.

"This decision is a total vindication for Ocheesee Creamery and a complete rejection of the Florida Department of Agriculture's suppression of speech," said Justin Pearson, a senior IJ attorney, in a statement this week. "Today, thanks to the 11th Circuit, [Ocheesee owner] Mary Lou [Wesselhoeft] is no longer denied her First Amendment right to tell the truth."

I served as an expert witness for Ocheesee Creamery in the casewriting an expert report and testifying in a deposition on its behalfand describe the case in some detail in my book, Biting the Hands that Feed Us: How Fewer, Smarter Laws Would Make Our Food System More Sustainable. Like Pearson, I couldn't be happier with the outcome of the 11th Circuit case.

The intervention of one of America's largest dairy lobbies into the case in support of the Florida regulationswhich I wrote about in Septemberis one interesting facet of the case.

"Food processors, such as Ocheesee, who choose not to replenish essential nutrients to the standardized level, must label those products as 'imitation,'" the International Dairy Foods Association argued.

Thankfully, the 11th Circuit Court saw otherwise.

As I've argued for yearsand first argued in a 2012 column herefood labels should be open "to any and all statements that aren't demonstrably false."

Use of terms like "natural," "almond milk," and "Just Mayo" on food labels are not the least bit misleading. Government efforts to stifle such speech and to rewrite the meaning of common dictionary terms to fit government ends are draconian, Machiavellian, Orwellian, and all sorts of other bad things ending in the suffix "-ian."

What's next for the Ocheesee case? I suspect Florida will ask the U.S. Supreme Court to take up its appeal of the case. That's when things could get even more interesting.

If the U.S. Supreme Court decides not to hear Florida's appeal, then the 11th Circuit Court's ruling will be the law of the land in Florida, Alabama, and Georgia, the three states within the court's jurisdiction. On the other hand, if the Supreme Court chooses to take up the casea distinct possibilityand to uphold the 11th Circuit's rulinganother distinct possibilitythen many state and federal standards of identity could rightly be in peril. The FDA's own requirements for skim milkwhich form the basis for Florida's standardcould be challenged.

But even if Florida doesn't appeal, or the Supreme Court decides the time isn't ripe to hear the Ocheesee case now, the toothpaste may already out of the tube. That's because the 11th Circuit ruling covering three adjoining statesFlorida, Alabama, and Georgiameans some enterprising dairy could begin transporting skim milk across state lines from one of those three states to another of those three states. As soon as the milk crossed state lines, it would be in violation of FDA rules, which govern interstate commerce.

Now suppose the FDA were to seize those shipments in interstate commerce. Where might a Florida, Alabama, or Georgia dairy or creamery that's been told by the FDA that it's run afoul of agency rules pertaining to the addition of vitamin A to skim milk take its case? More than likely, they'd take it to U.S. District Court in Florida, Alabama, or Georgia, federal courts which are bound by the precedent established by the 11th Circuitassuming the same facts are in evidenceand, I suspect, rule against the FDA. Of course, the FDA would appeal such a ruling. Who would hear the appeal? The 11th Circuit, the same court that just ruled against the Florida regulations.

Free speech won an important victory this week. Thanks to this win, I'm optimistic Florida's skim milk rules are the first of many similar ones that will fall in the coming months and years.

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Appeals Court Embraces Free Speech, Rules Skim Milk is 'Skim Milk ... - Reason (blog)