“Hazelwood” Goes to College
The issue of October 31, 2000, brought a letter from president Stuart Fagan complaining that the paper “failed to meet basic journalistic standards” and another from the dean of the college of arts and sciences calling an article by Hosty a “collection of untruths.” On November 1 the Innovator’s printer, Charles Richards, heard from Patricia Carter, the dean of student life. Richards later described that conversation in writing: “She told me that Regional Publishing was not to print any more issues of ‘The Innovator’ without first calling her personally and then she, herself, or someone else from the administration department would come to our printing plant, read the student newspaper’s contents, and approve the paper for printing by us.”
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As Porche and Hosty saw it, a public institution had squelched the press. Joined by a student reporter, they promptly took GSU to court, where federal judge Suzanne Conlon narrowed a long list of defendants to Carter, whom she said should stand trial. “Defendants concede that Innovator serves as a public forum,” Conlon reasoned, and in a public forum “the state’s right to limit expression is sharply circumscribed.”
Porche and Hosty were anything but grateful to Killam. He’d got on their bad side by noting “several ethical lapses” of their own, in particular their doubling as editors and student senators. Porche and Hosty wrote Killam, “We take great umbrage at that assessment, believing it to be entirely erroneous and, if not precariously single-minded, then astonishingly shortsighted.” At GSU, they explained, “student government and student media are united in purpose; to serve the best interests of the student body.”
Not so, Easterbrook has now replied. When journalists lost Branzburg v. Hayes in 1972 the courts and the media alike read into the opinions of a divided Supreme Court some sort of right to protect sources. The balloon didn’t burst until 2003, when the Seventh Circuit’s Richard Posner seized an opportunity to declare that Branzburg did no such thing.
Kelo v. New London, the eminent domain case that made the two Tribune columnists, their paper’s editorial page, and lots of other people very unhappy last week, shows how little “liberal” and “conservative” mean in the context of constitutional law. Justice John Paul Stevens, who wrote the opinion for the 5-4 majority that voted to uphold Connecticut’s supreme court, probably thought he was applying state laws and federal precedents as he found them. (Of course the Supreme Court majority always claims to be applying precedents as it finds them.) In his dissent, Clarence Thomas admitted as much. “Today’s decision,” he wrote, “is simply the latest in a string of our cases construing the Public Use Clause to be a virtual nullity.”
