Short Circuit Short Circuit 315 | A Day at the Races
A bit of a free speech derby this week, one opinion about free speech itself and another about how to just get to the First Amendment in the first place. We start in Florida with something that’s becoming a theme on the show: The Eleventh Circuit ruling that a law championed by the state’s governor and passed by the state legislature violates the First Amendment. The opinion concerns part of the “Stop WOKE Act” (acronym alert) and how the court pretty easily found that the law regulates speech, doesn’t pass scrutiny, and therefore is unconstitutional. But IJ’s Paul Avelar cautions that although the result may have seemed obvious it actually wasn’t that obvious because of some prior inconsistent cases. Then we hop over to California where IJ’s Christian Lansinger tells us of a horse that dare not speak its name. At least if it wants to race. But putting aside the right to give a horse a name that makes fun of someone else (in this case, the name is “Malpractice Meuser”), the Ninth Circuit focused on procedural hurdles (fences?) that stood in the way of the horse’s owner vindicating that right. It’s time to giddy up!