About | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline
LOG IN
LOG IN

43 Stetson L. Rev. i (2013-2014)

handle is hein.journals/stet43 and id is 1 raw text is: STETSON LAW REVIEW VOLUME 43 FALL 2013 NUMBER I INTRODUCTION Robert Batey 1 ARTICLES Mens Rea and Constitutional Law: A Report Card for the Florida Supreme Court in State v. Adkins Robert Batey 3 This Article analyzes the Florida Supreme Court decision in State v. Adkins, 96 So. 3d 412 (Fla. 2012), and how each justice decided the issue. The Court set out to definitively decide a controversial issue involving Section 893.13 of the Florida Statutes, a law that arguably made drug possession a strict liability offense. However, no majority was reached; the Court was split into a three-justice plurality, with two concurrences and two dissents. A professor at heart, Batey analyzes the approach each justice took in reaching a decision and assigns them all grades based on the legal deduction, reasoning, and justification found in each opinion. Arguing that no real conclusion was reached to this difficult legal issue, Professor Batey explores the shortcomings in each justice's interpretation of the law and how the issue should have been decided given each justice's prior history and ideological views, as well as by the precedent set by the Court itself. Piercing Pearson: Is Qualified Immunity Curbing Students' Religious Speech Rights? Matthew J. Shechtman 17 The First Amendment protects private discourse and individual contri- bution to the marketplace of ideas; it also limits the government's ability to impose religious views on its citizenry, while promising to guard the peoples' rights to practice the religion of their choice. These fundamental rights are focal points for extensive and controversial religious speech jurisprudence. The extent of these speech rights depends predominantly on who the relevant speaker is: the government may regulate its own speech but is hamstrung from endorsing religion, while private speech enjoys expansive constitutional protection and is not limited by the Estab- lishment Clause. Identifying the speaker can sometimes be a difficult endeavor, however; one such example is of utmost concern to a large, yet distinct, subset of the population-public school students. Accordingly, this Article focuses on student religious speech in public schools and the First Amendment's protection thereof. This inquiry is informed by student speech jurisprudence, the axiomatic prohibition against viewpoint discrimination, and government avoidance of Estab- lishment Clause violations. This complicated and oftentimes contradictory caselaw is troubling in its own right, yet is circumscribed even further by another major concern that inhibits students' free speech rights-qualified immunity. Qualified immunity protects government officials from civil liability under certain circumstances. This defense does not, however, protect a government official who infringes on a student's (1) clearly established (2) constitutional rights. This two-prong test is meant to protect gov- ernment officials' reasonable discretionary actions. Of some concern, however, the Supreme Court has generally advised lower courts to reach the clearly established prong before the constitutional violation prong.

What Is HeinOnline?

HeinOnline is a subscription-based resource containing thousands of academic and legal journals from inception; complete coverage of government documents such as U.S. Statutes at Large, U.S. Code, Federal Register, Code of Federal Regulations, U.S. Reports, and much more. Documents are image-based, fully searchable PDFs with the authority of print combined with the accessibility of a user-friendly and powerful database. For more information, request a quote or trial for your organization below.



Short-term subscription options include 24 hours, 48 hours, or 1 week to HeinOnline.

Purchase Access

Contact us for annual subscription options:

Contact Us

Already a HeinOnline Subscriber?

Log In

profiles profiles most