Com Law and Lit

  Stable Change: The Necessary Expression Value As I glance over the eight values of free expression, the one that resonates with me the most, as well as reflected within our society today, is stable change. Since under the first amendment we are given the right to petition and protest (peaceably), us citizens have direct access in communicating with the government to voice our concerns. In addition, this freedom allows for people to express their anger in a professional manner, as opposed to destroying government property or leading to a revolution. As Benedict Spinoza points out, it enables the government to also conduct surveillance on potentially dangerous groups/organizations.  The reason why I value this free expression over the other seven is because I am a person that likes to vent and get my emotions out of my system so I can feel better. Bottling up any emotion, in this case I am assuming anger, is unhealthy and will lead to drastic...

Why Haven't We Heard of These Sites?    The two sites shown on the blogger are ANTIWAR and American Conservative .  The first site, ANTIWAR, features links to articles from other news sources related to international tensions, war efforts, military plans, etc, as well as . In addition, numerous of these articles found on the front page have strong antiwar  messages, such as the language used in this article on the site by Dave DeCamp, "US commanders blame the encounters on Moscow and Damascus, but while the US maintains its presence in the country against the will of the Syrian government, confrontations are bound to happen. These additional forces will only make similar incidents more likely." As one can see, the use of the words "against the will", "only make", and "confrontations" prove that the author of this article is against the occupation of American troop's in Syria. These words denote that because of our President's de...

Rioting Through The Six Freedoms   The question posed for this blog post is to look at the Black Lives Matter protests through the lens of our 6 freedoms, which are freedom from religion, of religion, speech, press, (peaceably) assemble, and petition. For the matter of context, I will be using the news source cited here .  As one can see, on September 5th, over $100,000 in property damage was done to private property in lower Manhattan. Larry Celona points out how protesters were lighting trash cans on fire, using burglary tools to break into shop fronts and loot the store, as well as spray graffiti on shop fronts. Causing any form of destruction to anyone, whether it is a private individual or the government, is NOT protected by the first amendment. Hurting a person/property is in no way, shape, or form a type of artistic expression, free in a religious context, and obviously not peaceably assembling if there is chaos and destruction. Similarly, there is a small se...

 SCOTUS Review   For this blog-post, I will be discussing what I have learned/thought was interesting in the SCOTUS history reading. One thing that I thought was humorous was how the first Supreme Court assembly was supposed to take place on February 1st, 1790, but it had to be postponed due to transportation issues. Imagine a bunch of old men being stuck in horse traffic, looking at their pocket watches horridly as they realize they will be late to a major event in American history. Oddly enough, it happened the next day where the development of organizational procedures took place. Sticking with what was funny, in the next paragraph, we learn that the first ever case, West v. Barnes , was an insignificant case between a farmer and a family he owed money too. Despite this case being incredibly boring, for some reason this case sticks with me a lot more than the significant cases, such as Miranda v. Arizona or Marbury v. Madison . All jokes aside, I was curious as to why the n...