Eugene Volokh and Jane Bambauer discuss the Court’s June 27 decision in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, which upheld a state law that required pornography sites to “use reasonable age verification methods ... to verify” that their users are adults.

Recorded on July 1, 2025.

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Eugene Volokh and Jane Bambauer discuss the First Amendment rules pertaining to public school students. The occasion: The Supreme Court just declined to consider a federal appeals court case that led a public school to punish a student for wearing a T-shirt saying “There Are Only Two Genders.” Did the lower court get that right?

Recorded on June 3, 2025. 

A mother sues Character.AI, claiming that a conversation between her teenage son and a Character.AI chatbot led him to commit suicide. A conservative activist sues Meta, claiming that its AI-generated false accusations about him. Jane Bambauer and Eugene Volokh analyze these cases, and more broadly, discuss lawsuits against AI companies, and possible First Amendment defenses to those lawsuits.

Recorded on May 6, 2025. 

Eugene Volokh and Jane Bambauer discuss the Administration’s freezing of grants to Harvard, and Harvard’s lawsuit challenging the freeze.

The Trump Administration has announced that it was freezing grants to Harvard, and demanding that Harvard change many of its policies and practices in order to get back in the Administration’s good graces.  President Trump has also suggested that Harvard might lose its tax-exempt status for “pushing political, ideological, and terrorist inspired/supporting ‘Sickness.’” Would such a cutoff of funding or tax exemption benefits violate the First Amendment? Jane and Eugene dig deep into that.

Recorded on April 22, 2025.

Eugene Volokh and Jane Bambauer discuss President Trump’s Executive Orders that target major law firms (such as WilmerHale and Jenner & Block).

The orders target the firms for retaliation based largely on their past support of various left-wing legal causes. Do those Orders violate the firms’ (and their clients’) Free Speech Clause or Petition Clause rights? Might they also violate the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause (in civil cases) and the Sixth Amendment right to counsel (in criminal cases)?

Recorded on March 31, 2025.

Eugene Volokh and Jane Bambauer discuss the First Amendment and immigration law.

Recorded on March 12, 2025.

Does the Free Press Clause provide extra rights to the institutional press, or instead protect all speakers’ equal rights to use the printing press and its technological heirs? Eugene Volokh and Jane Bambauer discuss this and more with legendary First Amendment litigator Floyd Abrams.

Download the 2025 Stanford Emerging Technology Review here: https://stanford.io/4bilFg0 

Recorded on February 21, 2025.

​The Constitution generally covers only government action; if a private university expels students for their speech, or a private shopping mall forbids leafletting, or a private employer fires an employee for backing some candidate, that doesn’t violate the First Amendment. But state laws in roughly half the states do limit some such private restrictions on speech and political activity, especially ones imposed by private employers, much as federal law limits private employers’ restriction on their employees’ religious activity. Should there be more such laws? Fewer? Eugene Volokh and Jane Bambauer talk about this, and more.

Recorded on January 28, 2025.

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Congress, worried that TikTok may be unduly subject to Chinese government control, passed a law that would in effect stop TikTok from being made available in the U.S. unless it’s sold off to a non-China-linked company. This morning (Dec. 6), the federal D.C. Circuit upheld the law against a First Amendment challenge (and some other legal challenges); Jane Bambauer and Eugene Volokh explain.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS:

Eugene Volokh is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. For thirty years, he had been a professor at the University of California – Los Angeles School of Law, where he has taught First Amendment law, copyright law, criminal law, tort law, and firearms regulation policy. Volokh is the author of the textbooks The First Amendment and Related Statutes (8th ed., 2023) and Academic Legal Writing (5th ed., 2016), as well as more than one hundred law review articles. He is the founder and coauthor of The Volokh Conspiracy, a leading legal blog. Before coming to UCLA, Volokh clerked for Justice Sandra Day O’Connor on the US Supreme Court.

Jane Bambauer is the Brechner Eminent Scholar at the University of Florida's Levin College of Law and the College of Journalism and Communications. She teaches Torts, First Amendment, Media Law, Criminal Procedure, and Privacy Law. Bambauer’s research assesses the social costs and benefits of Big Data, AI, and predictive algorithms. Her work analyzes how the regulation of these new information technologies will affect free speech, privacy, law enforcement, health and safety, competitive markets, and government accountability. Bambauer’s research has been featured in over 20 scholarly publications, including the Stanford Law Review, the Michigan Law Review, the California Law Review, and the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies.

ABOUT THE SERIES:

Hoover Institution Senior Fellow Eugene Volokh is the co-founder of The Volokh Conspiracy and one of the country’s foremost experts on the 1st Amendment and the legal issues surrounding free speech. Jane Bambauer is a distinguished professor of law and journalism at the University of Florida. On Free Speech Unmuted, Volokh and Bambauer unpack and analyze the current issues and controversies concerning the First Amendment, censorship, the press, social media, and the proverbial town square. They explain in plain English the often confusing legalese around these issues and explain how the courts and government agencies interpret the Constitution and new laws being written, passed, and decided will affect Americans' everyday lives.

How does European free speech law differ from American free speech law, when it comes to “hate speech,” blasphemy, and misinformation?

Jane Bambauer and Eugene Volokh welcome Jacob Mchangama, who is CEO of The Future of Free Speech; research professor of political science at Vanderbilt; the author of Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media and other works on free speech; Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression; and a trained Danish lawyer who is one of the leading experts in comparative free speech law.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS:

Eugene Volokh is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. For thirty years, he had been a professor at the University of California – Los Angeles School of Law, where he has taught First Amendment law, copyright law, criminal law, tort law, and firearms regulation policy. Volokh is the author of the textbooks The First Amendment and Related Statutes (8th ed., 2023) and Academic Legal Writing (5th ed., 2016), as well as more than one hundred law review articles. He is the founder and coauthor of The Volokh Conspiracy, a leading legal blog. Before coming to UCLA, Volokh clerked for Justice Sandra Day O’Connor on the US Supreme Court.

Jane Bambauer is the Brechner Eminent Scholar at the University of Florida's Levin College of Law and the College of Journalism and Communications. She teaches Torts, First Amendment, Media Law, Criminal Procedure, and Privacy Law. Bambauer’s research assesses the social costs and benefits of Big Data, AI, and predictive algorithms. Her work analyzes how the regulation of these new information technologies will affect free speech, privacy, law enforcement, health and safety, competitive markets, and government accountability. Bambauer’s research has been featured in over 20 scholarly publications, including the Stanford Law Review, the Michigan Law Review, the California Law Review, and the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies.

ABOUT THE SERIES:

Hoover Institution Senior Fellow Eugene Volokh is the co-founder of The Volokh Conspiracy and one of the country’s foremost experts on the 1st Amendment and the legal issues surrounding free speech. Jane Bambauer is a distinguished professor of law and journalism at the University of Florida. On Free Speech Unmuted, Volokh and Bambauer unpack and analyze the current issues and controversies concerning the First Amendment, censorship, the press, social media, and the proverbial town square. They explain in plain English the often confusing legalese around these issues and explain how the courts and government agencies interpret the Constitution and new laws being written, passed, and decided will affect Americans' everyday lives.