First Amendment Students Take Note: Kansas Professor Placed on Leave for Tweet

Over at Constitutional Law Prof Blog, Ruthann Robson posts about a University of Kansas journalism professor, David Guth, who was recently placed on administrative leave following a tweet about the Navy Yard shooting in Washington DC.  The Kansas City Star reports on the story here.

The tweet read:

"The blood is on the hands of the #NRA. Next time, let it be YOUR sons and daughters. Shame on you. May God damn you.”

Law students who are taking First Amendment law should take note of this story because, as Robson notes, this scenario is an excellent candidate for an issue-spotting question. This scenario raises the issues of speech by public employees, true threats, advocacy of illegal action, defamation, and probably others.

The one point I would like to Robson's analysis is that I don't think that there is as much of a reason to analyze this situation under a true threats approach as there is to ask whether it constitutes advocacy of illegal action. Guth does not seem to indicate that he is about to attack NRA members so much as he voices a call that the members suffer.

Because of the general nature of Guth's tweet, and because the tweet appears to simply wish that NRA members suffer from violence rather than urge others to do violence upon NRA members, the tweet does not seem to rise to the level of unprotected speech under Brandenburg.

As a final note on this issue, I checked out Guth's personal blog. As Robson notes, the September 16 entry discusses the Navy Yard shooting. I was distracted, however, by Guth's blog description, which I found to be eloquent, if not poetic:

There are a lot of people online with nothing much to say. I am not one of those folks. I hope that you find my comments insightful, provocative and occasionally amusing. I am a college professor, Jayhawk Journalist and writer. I am not software engineer. I am a content guy. Whatever this blog may lack in flash will be more than made up for in substance.

Also, every post that Guth writes ends with "That's it for now.  Fear the Turtle."  I don't know why.