Eugene Volokh
Eugene Volokh is the Thomas M. Siebel Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and professor emeritus at UCLA School of Law. A leading First Amendment scholar, he hosts Hoover’s Free Speech Unmuted and is founder and coauthor of The Volokh Conspiracy legal blog.
Unwanted Sexual Texts to Officials Test First Amendment Harassment Limits
Eugene Volokh and Jane Bambauer use an Ohio harassment dispute over sexually explicit Shrek images allegedly texted to a state senator to examine a harder First Amendment question: when offensive political speech becomes punishable direct harassment. Volokh argues that the law often distinguishes speech about a person from unwanted speech to a person, but says the doctrine is unsettled when the recipient is a government official, the channel is a phone, and the content is sexual but not obscene. Bambauer presses whether punishment should require notice to stop and whether statutes broad enough to reach unsolicited explicit images may also capture protected political criticism.
The First Amendment Leaves Privacy Torts With Narrower Reach
Eugene Volokh and Jane Bambauer argue that privacy is not a single counterweight to the First Amendment but a set of distinct claims, some of which protect speech and others of which restrict it. In a Hoover Institution discussion, they distinguish privacy against government surveillance or compelled identification from privacy asserted against other speakers, where claims over anonymity, hidden recording, private facts, false light, and publicity rights can become demands to limit what others may say.