Jane Bambauer
Jane Bambauer is the Brechner Eminent Scholar and Professor of Law at the University of Florida, where she teaches torts, First Amendment, media, criminal procedure, and privacy law. She co-hosts Hoover Institution’s Free Speech Unmuted with Eugene Volokh, and her scholarship focuses on Big Data, AI, predictive algorithms, privacy, free speech, and technology regulation.
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.