Month / July 14, 2015
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Elonis v. United States: When Are Threats Free Speech?
“Fold up your [protection from abuse order] and put it in your pocket Is it thick enough to stop a bullet?” So wrote Anthony Elonis after his wife left him in 2010. Elonis took to Facebook with the pseudonym “Tone Dougie” to create rap lyrics laced with expletives in what he termed “therapeutic” writing. These…
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Beast Mode Cashes In
“I’m just here so I won’t get fined,” Marshawn Lynch told the horde of reporters gathered around him on Super Bowl Media Day. True to his word, Lynch refused to answer a single question thrown at him, repeating that same phrase 28 more times in the mandatory five-minute press conference. The reporters could not have…
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Regulating the Race to the Bottom
On November 24, 2012, a fire broke out in the Tazreen Fashions factory near Dhaka, Bangladesh. Managers ordered workers to stay in their seats, thinking the alarm was a drill. 123 workers died as the fire spread throughout the building. Workers trapped inside were incinerated; others jumped to their deaths out of upper-story windows. Five…
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The Stubborn Nails of China
For over a year, Luo Baogen and his wife lived in a house in the middle of a major road in the Zhejiang province of eastern China. The government asked them to move to make room for a highway but, unwilling to give up their recently renovated home for inadequate compensation, they stayed put and…