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Browsing Department of Communication by Author "Dee, Juliet"
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Item Charlottesville, January 6 and Incitement: Can Civil Conspiracy Laws Permit an End-Run around Brandenburg v. Ohio?(Communication Law Review, 2022) Dee, JulietIn this article we analyze how courts have applied the federal Anti-Riot Act, the Brandenburg test for incitement, and civil conspiracy laws to two events: 1) the 2017 Unite the Right march in Charlottesville, Virginia, and 2) the January 6, 2021 insurrection and the storming of the U.S. Capitol. The thesis of this article is that civil conspiracy laws will be more effective for plaintiffs seeking redress of grievances against Donald Trump for the January 6, 2021 insurrection than will invoking the federal Anti-Riot Act because the Brandenburg test’s requirement of proving a speaker’s intent to incite violence is too steep a hill to climb. When plaintiffs file civil conspiracy suits, there is no guarantee that they will prevail. Whether they win or lose, however, they may be trying to turn a civil trial into a public forum in order to focus society’s attention on grievous wrongs that they have suffered.Item Fighting back: Is defamation law a double-edged sword for #MeToo victims?(First Amendment Studies, 2021-11-04) Dee, JulietDuring the past half-century, countless women have been victims of sexual harassment, groping, and rape. When the #MeToo Movement gained momentum in October 2017, women who had victimized began to speak out. If women who were victims of sexual predators had not originally reported being raped but came forward as part of the #MeToo movement two or three decades later and the perpetrators denied it (in essence, accusing the victims of lying), their only legal recourse has been to sue the sexual predators for defamation. The law of defamation is a double-edged sword, however, because if victims use social media platforms to “name and shame” the men who raped them, the perpetrators have also sued their alleged victims for libel. This discussion examines the effectiveness of turning to defamation law as a means of redressing grievances in #MeToo cases, and also applies critical legal theory to these cases. In other words, if there is pervasive structural inequity in the legal system, meaning that perpetrators are often wealthy and powerful men who can easily afford attorneys’ fees, can victims still prevail in court, or can wealthy and powerful perpetrators buy their victims’ silence with non-disclosure agreements?