Month: April 2026

After years of prosecuting people for their social media activity, the U.K. government says it will stop wasting time “investigating legal social media posts.”  

This policy change, which the U.K. Home Office announced on Tuesday, was greeted as a free speech victory (even if the move is long overdue). However, without further reforms, censorship in the U.K. will continue, warns Preston Byrne, a senior fellow at the London-based Adam Smith Institute. That’s because the U.K. still has a “legal regime that allows the state to police opinions it deems contrary to its interests,” he wrote on X. 

To fix this problem, Byrne, along with Michael Reiners and Elijah Granet, published the “Free Speech Bill” on Wednesday to protect freedom of expression in the U.K.

This model legislation seeks to “restore the ancient liberty of free speech” in the U.K. and take a “wrecking ball” to the laws used to censor Brits. Notably, it would repeal the 2023 U.K. Online Safety Act, a regulation that has effectively censored a wide array of online content under the guise of protecting children. As Reason’s Elizabeth Nolan Brown has noted, the bill has “[put] up roadblocks for people who want to read about world news, view classic art, listen to music on Spotify, chat with friends on Discord, play video games, find information about quitting smoking, or join antimasturbation groups.” With the Online Safety Act struck down, the bill proposes regulating online speech similar to how the U.S. does. Under American law, namely Section 230 of the Communications Act, online platforms are not held liable for the speech and content of their users.  

The Free Speech Bill would also repeal or amend laws that send Brits to jail for speech crimes, including the Communications Act of 2003 and the Malicious Communications Act 1988. These laws criminalize sending “grossly offensive” and “indecent” messages, and they have been used to arrest thousands of people. According to The Times, approximately 12,000 people were arrested under these acts in 2023 for posting offensive messages online. That’s about 33 people each day. Also on the chopping block are parts of the U.K.’s terrorism laws, which have been used to arrest nonviolent pro-Palestinian protesters. The model bill also describes what is not protected speech, and it adopts a Brandenburg test for incitement, which allows the government to prosecute speech only if it is “directed” at inciting “imminent lawless action” and “likely” to have that effect.

“In a free society, fools, bigots, and assholes get to speak and remain free men,” Byrne wrote in a press release. “That is not the price of liberty. It is liberty, and the rest of us get it too.” 

As a lawyer, Byrne has challenged the U.K.’s censorship complex before. When the U.K.’s online regulator, Ofcom, pressured 4chan and other U.S. companies that Byrne represents to comply with the Online Safety Act, he fought their demands by refusing to pay fines and threatening to turn their warnings into bedding for his pet hamster. In January, he told Reason that countering British censorship from the U.S. is relatively easy because the First Amendment allows U.S. companies to simply say no to U.K. regulators’ unlawful demands. 

But he tells Reason that being on the defensive is not enough. 

“We can’t win this fight by just defending our borders. We have to deal with the problem at its source, and that means translating the First Amendment to a UK context – something which, as far as I am aware, has never been done – and deploying that tooling to civil society for debate, modification, and, hopefully, one day, enactment,” Byrne says. 

“The Free Speech Act is perfectly aligned with Britain’s liberal history and traditional British values,” he added in the press release. The values “are sane and just, and values which the UK’s current speech rules do not align with.” 

The model bill has yet to be introduced as a formal piece of legislation by a U.K. lawmaker. Byrne says his strategy is to “go straight to the grassroots,” and he hopes government support will follow. 

The post What If the U.K. Had Free Speech Like the U.S.? appeared first on Reason.com.

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Much ink has been spilled over the issues at stake in today’s upcoming Supreme Court oral argument in Trump v. Barbara, the birthright citizenship case. There are many reasons why the Trump administration’s position is badly wrong. Prominent constitutional law scholars Akhil Amar, Vikram Amar, and Samarth Desai recently published a helpful overview of some key issues at SCOTUSblog. But one key point has, I fear, still not gotten the attention it deserves: all of the standard arguments for the administration’s position suffer from the crucial weakness that they are at odds with the main purpose of the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment: granting citizenship to freed slaves and their children. I covered this issue in a recent Lawfare article:

Trump v. Barbara, the birthright citizenship case, is currently before the Supreme Court. At the heart of the case is a Jan. 20, 2025 executive order that sought to deny birthright citizenship to children born in the U.S. whose parents are in the country either illegally or on temporary visas. The case has produced a vast array of amicus briefs as well as the briefs of the parties. But one key issue has not received the attention it deserves.

Accepting the government’s position would undermine the central purpose of the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. For that reason alone, the Trump Administration should lose the case, especially from the standpoint of originalism.

Virtually all informed observers agree that the main purpose of the Citizenship Clause was to grant citizenship to newly freed slaves and their descendants, reversing the holding of the Supreme Court’s infamous 1857 Dred Scott decision, which ruled that Black people could never be citizens of the United States. Indeed, the Trump administration’s Supreme Court brief in Trump v. Barbara says exactly that: “The Clause was adopted to confer citizenship on the newly freed slaves and their children.” But all of the administration’s arguments for denying birthright citizenship to children of undocumented immigrants and non-citizens present in the U.S. on temporary visas would, if applied consistently, also have denied citizenship to numerous freed slaves and children thereof.

This reality puts the government’s arguments at odds with the original meaning of the Citizenship Clause. Since contemporaries almost universally understood that Clause as granting citizenship to freed slaves, their children, and other Black people born in the United States, any interpretation of  “subject to the jurisdiction” that requires denying birthright citizenship to large numbers of slaves and children thereof must be rejected. That is particularly true from an originalist standpoint, which requires adherence to the understanding of the words prevalent at the time of ratification.

The rest of the article goes through the various standard arguments advanced by the administration and its supporters, such as claims that their parents’ illegal entry puts children outside the scope of US jurisdiction, arguments based on various notions of “allegiance,” domicile arguments, and theories of “complete political jurisdiction.” I  explains how all of these theories share the same fatal flaw.

The post Slavery, Birthright Citizenship, and Today's Upcoming Supreme Court Oral Argument appeared first on Reason.com.

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You can’t defund NPR? Last May, President Donald Trump issued an executive order on “Ending Taxpayer Subsidization of Biased Media.” 

The order targeted the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), which at the time doled out funds to National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). Trump’s order directed the CPB to cease funding to NPR and PBS.

Trump’s reasoning for the order was quite explicit: “Americans have the right to expect that if their tax dollars fund public broadcasting at all, they fund only fair, accurate, unbiased, and nonpartisan news coverage.” 

Yesterday, a U.S. district judge said the ruling was illegal. The judge, Randolph Moss, ruled that Trump had violated the First Amendment with the order because it amounted to punishment for politically disfavored speech. 

The judge said the order “clearly crosses the line” into something like politically motivated censorship. “The message is clear,” Moss wrote. “NPR and PBS need not apply for any federal benefit because the president disapproves of their ‘left-wing’ coverage of the news.” Trump’s order, the judge wrote, amounted to government “retaliation” for speech.

There were several things to like about Trump’s initial executive order. It noted that today’s media market “is filled with abundant, diverse, and innovative news options,” and it declared that “government funding of news media in this environment is not only outdated and unnecessary but corrosive to the appearance of journalistic independence.” 

These are good points, and my colleagues at Reason have been making a similar case for many, many years. On the merits, there was never a good argument for taxpayer funding of public media. 

But as Reason’s Jesse Walker wrote last year, there were some genuine legal questions about whether Trump had the authority to defund public media through executive order.

And Trump’s criticism of NPR’s coverage of him made the executive order look like an act of personal pique rather than a speech-neutral decision not to fund a government program. Moss wrote that the text of the executive order, along with other public statements, made it “difficult to conceive of clearer evidence that a government action is targeted at viewpoints that the president does not like and seeks to squelch.”

As is sometimes the case, Trump did the right thing—but not in the ideal way. 

Practically, however, the ruling won’t have much of an impact. Shortly after Trump’s order was issued, Congress pulled about $500 million from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which then shut down. So at least in the short term, the ruling is moot. 

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Strictly ballroom. That wasn’t the only loss Trump faced in court yesterday. Separately, a federal judge said that Trump could not proceed with the construction of his planned White House ballroom until the $400 million project was approved by Congress. 

The project is being funded with private donations that have been routed through the National Park Service. But even still, Judge Richard Leon said, Trump had exceeded his authority to proceed with the project unilaterally. Congress, he said, must explicitly authorize construction. 

As I noted yesterday, Trump’s ballroom plans have been criticized, with multiple media reports saying that some mostly unnamed architects are worried the ballroom plan was rushed through with insufficient review and oversight. Some of the stated concerns had merit, like stairs going nowhere and oddly placed windows and bathrooms. 

But while this project isn’t exactly typical, and public buildings are obviously different than private developments, it’s at least a little bit telling that one of the chief complaints about the project was that it was insufficiently bogged down in bureaucratic process and public review. It’s almost like the delays are the point. 

In any case, the judge says the ball, or rather the building, is now in the legislature’s court: “The President,” the judge wrote, “may at any time go to Congress to obtain express authority to construct a ballroom and to do so with private funds.” 

Congress? Act? I suppose there’s a first time for everything. 

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Scenes from Washington, D.C.: For years, Tail Up Goat was hailed as one of D.C.’s best restaurants. But the Adams Morgan establishment closed and is now set to reopen with a new name and new concept from the same owners. The new restaurant will be called Rye Bunny—and instead of a full-service, sit-down restaurant, it will be a counter-service spot, almost like your local deli, except with high-end fare. 

There’s reason to suspect that this is a response to escalating labor costs in the District. The owners have talked about how dicey Tail Up Goat’s finances were, even with the good reviews. The new establishment is designed to be different. “From the restaurant’s perspective, the model is far more economically viable because they need nearly half as many front-of-house employees as they did before,” reports Washingtonian. (Front-of-house employees are waiters, bussers, and the like.)

D.C. has a great food scene, but restaurants have struggled in recent years, with a record number of closings last year. And at least part of the struggle has been the costs imposed by the city via changes to the way restaurants are required to compensate tipped workers. Yes, some of those changes have been paused, though not fully rolled back. But owning and operating a restaurant is tough in the best of times, and D.C.’s government has mostly made it more expensive and more onerous.

For more, watch Justin Zuckerman’s excellent 2024 documentary on why some D.C. restaurant workers prefer a lower minimum wage. 

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QUICK HITS

• Trump will address the nation about Iran tonight.
  

TUNE IN: Tomorrow night at 9PM ET, President Trump will give an Address to the Nation to provide an important update on Iran.

— Karoline Leavitt (@PressSec) March 31, 2026

• Meanwhile, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth says regime change has already occurred in Iran. 
• And an Iranian official says the Strait of Hormuz will reopen, just not for America.
• New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, whose campaign was powered by social video, now says that city agencies may use TikTok. 
• The Artemis II launch, which will take astronauts near the moon, is set for today. This will supposedly pave the way for an actual moon landing in the near future. The rocket being used for the launch is 322 feet tall. 
• Congress is going after prediction markets.
• The Supreme Court said that Colorado could not ban “conversion therapy” for gay and transgender minors. The state’s law “censors speech based on viewpoint,” wrote Justice Neil Gorsuch. 
• “If Gen Z’s general disinterest in religion persists, American society will only secularize further.” On the supposed religious revival in America.
• The decline in marriage is real. But it’s concentrated in working-class women, not the ambitious strivers who populate trend pieces. 
• There’s a new trailer for this summer’s forthcoming Supergirl movie. For all you 1990s comic book nerds, it even shows off Lobo. Holy guacamole!

The post Illegal To Defund NPR? appeared first on Reason.com.

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From Judge Ronnie Abrams yesterday in Doe v. Legal Aid Society (S.D.N.Y.):

[1.] [Pseudonymity is more justified if] the litigation involves matters of a highly sensitive and personal nature. This case involves allegations of sexual harassment, which undoubtedly qualify. Thus, while this factor weighs in Plaintiff’s favor, courts in this District have routinely held that allegations of sexual harassment and assault alone “are not sufficient to entitle a plaintiff to proceed under a pseudonym.” …

[2.] Plaintiff presents no evidence of any existing or potential threats or intimidation that she would experience should her identity be revealed. She claims only that revealing her identity would cause her and her former clients at LAS emotional harm and embarrassment. As to the allegation that it will pose a risk of mental harm to her and her clients, it is conclusory at best.

Moreover, “a plaintiff must allege more than public humiliation—she must provide corroboration from medical professionals that detail the risk to plaintiff.” Such evidence “must detail how revealing [P]laintiff’s name in particular, as opposed to the trauma that could occur through reliving the experience through litigation, would cause harm.” Plaintiff provides no such evidence, and as such, the Court cannot “speculate about the nature and severity of any mental injury from disclosure.” …

[3.] Plaintiff argues that LAS is aware of her true identity, and as such, will be able to litigate the matter regardless of whether her identity is shared with the public. LAS’s only inconvenience, she maintains, would be “the need to make redactions and take measures not to disclose plaintiff’s identity,” which she acknowledges would create challenges for LAS during discovery.

While it is true that LAS may only be marginally inconvenienced were the Court to grant Plaintiff’s request, it is insufficient to tilt this factor in her favor, because, even where the defendant knows the plaintiff’s identity, “concealment of plaintiff’s identity from the public can still hamper defendants’ ability to conduct discovery.” “This is especially true in a case … that happened over ten years ago[,] where evidence and witnesses may be difficult to find.”

The events that gave rise to Plaintiff’s Privacy Motion stem from allegations that began over a decade ago. Furthermore, LAS is right to note that when claims involve sexual harassment or assault, “the reputational damage risk to Defendant is high and fairness requires that plaintiff be prepared to stand behind her charges publicly.” … “Allowing Plaintiff to proceed anonymously would disadvantage Defendants at all stages of litigation, including settlement, discovery, and trial.” …

[4.] The Court next considers whether Plaintiff’s identity has been kept confidential. As discussed above, and as Plaintiff acknowledges, her identity is known by LAS leadership and former colleagues. She nonetheless maintains that she has kept her identity concealed from the general public. While that may be true, LAS points to Plaintiff’s inclusion of her real name and contact information in her EEOC complaint, which courts have found to weigh against granting a motion to proceed anonymously….

[5.] “Courts have put weight on the right of the public to know the identity of the litigants as well as on the interest of the accused to be able publicly to confront the accuser.” Courts therefore require “something more … to rebut the presumption of public access, at least in cases involving adult sexual assault, and that something more frequently has to be evidence of real (and not conclusory) harm that is substantial and that will flow directly from and is directly linked to disclosure of the party’s name.”

Plaintiff’s arguments that the public interest is not served by disclosure are conclusory at best and “it does not follow that the public has an interest in maintaining the anonymity of every person who alleges sexual assault or other misconduct of a highly personal nature.” “Otherwise, this factor would, in effect, heavily favor anonymity in every sexual assault case.” …

Here’s the court’s summary of the factual allegations from the parties:

Over a decade ago, Plaintiff, then a staff attorney at LAS, began experiencing what she characterizes as a “long-lasting campaign of quid pro quo sexual harassment, and retaliation” against her by Christopher Pisciotta, the Attorney-in-Charge of the Staten Island Criminal Defense Office …. She claims her rebuffs were met with alleged retaliation by Pisciotta who would threaten discipline, among other acts. Following these encounters, Plaintiff maintains that rumors that she and Pisciotta were having an affair abounded at the Staten Island office, which she attempted to dispel by reporting his actions to management at LAS to no avail.

LAS tells a different story—one that identifies Plaintiff rather than Pisciotta as the source of the interpersonal dispute. Beginning in 2017, when Plaintiff was transferred from the Staten Island Office to the Queens County Office, LAS alleges that she began sending “unwanted text and email communications to” Pisciotta, and that it had to reprimand her on three different occasions.

In his declaration, LAS’s General Counsel Scott Rosenberg asserts that Plaintiff was eventually terminated from her position for insubordination on November 7, 2022. Despite Plaintiff’s representations that she was never terminated, the parties agreed to a Separation Agreement on February 6, 2023, which placed her on Unpaid Administrative Leave until December 31, 2023. By the beginning of 2023, Plaintiff began looking for a new position and that March secured an interview with Scott Banks at the Legal Aid Society of Nassau County for a family court supervisory position, which required her to provide professional references from her supervisors at LAS, including Pisciotta.

Hoping to thwart a negative reference, Plaintiff claims that she set up a call with Pisciotta to encourage him to dodge any communications from Banks. During the call, she alleges, Pisciotta sexually harassed her and threatened to divulge that she was “on leave, looking for work, and working with general counsel,” and that afterwards, Pisciotta called Banks back and followed up on his threat to tell him several “negative things” about her.

Plaintiff repeatedly sought information from Rosenberg about how the call went, and enraged by his responses, describes feeling “the great sense of crushing fear that not only was [Pisciotta] intensely focused on her but that he now had the written backing of the mighty LEGAL AID SOCIETY OF NEW YORK CITY to quid pro quo sexually harass the Plaintiff indefinitely either on the job with the prospective employer or on other legal service jobs.”

The post No Pseudonymity for Lawyer Alleging Quid Pro Quo Sexual Harassment and Retaliation appeared first on Reason.com.

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