6 Matching Annotations
  1. Aug 2022
  2. Nov 2015
  3. Sep 2014
    1. Amicus brief in Anthony Douglas Elonis v. United States, including a long section describing the origins and history of hip hop, calling for the court to take serious caution when ruling on the actual or real intent to harm communicated (or not) by potentially hyperbolic lyrics and braggadocio.

    2. What level of knowledge of rap and understanding of its complicated conventions is a defendant-speaker to assume, in advance of communication, that a hypothetically reasonable person possesses in order to properly understand a rap message? Because the answer is anything but clear and because a speaker’s First Amendment rights should not hang on what amounts to guesswork about an audience’s hypothetically reasonable knowledge of a complex artistic and political genre of expression, the actual subjective intent of the defendant-speaker must be considered in both the First Amendment and statutory true threats analyses.