This month, we’ve asked the U.S. Supreme Court to once again
take up the case of Arnold Fleck, the North Dakota
attorney whose First Amendment rights have been violated for years by state
laws forcing him to join and to pay annual dues to the State Bar Association of
North Dakota (SBAND).
Bar associations like SBAND aren’t to be confused with the
bar exam, which is the licensing requirement lawyers must satisfy. Bar
associations are clubs—trade associations that engage in a wide variety of
activities, including lobbying the government. Fleck argues that forcing him to
join SBAND violates his freedom of association, and forcing him to pay it
annual dues—which in the past it has spent on political campaigns as well as
lobbying—violates his free speech rights.
Fleck appealed to the Supreme Court, which only months later
announced its ruling in the Janus case, which held that the
Constitution forbids states from forcing public employees to join unions, and
also that people have a constitutional right to decide whether to contribute to
their political spending—and that the mere option of a refund isn’t good
enough.
We’re hoping the Supreme Court will take up the case of
Arnold Fleck—and of thousands of lawyers who are today forced to join these
private trade associations and to subsidize what’s often their politically
charged activities. Read more about Fleck’s case and how the Goldwater
Institute is defending his First Amendment rights here.
Would you believe that conservative
college students in America are afraid to share their opinions
because they fear how their peers or professors may respond? It’s sad but true,
according to a new survey of students at the University of North Carolina.
Almost 40 percent of students that identify as conservative
say that they have some level of “concern” that other students would file a
complaint against them based on something they say in a class that discusses
politics. It appears that those students are
even censoring themselves in order to avoid scorn.
Seventeen percent of conservative students said they “kept an
opinion related to class to themselves” more than 10 times. This sounds like a
modest figure, but just 1.5 percent of liberal respondents said they
self-censored to this degree. Seventy-six percent of liberal students said they
never chose to keep ideas to themselves, compared to 32 percent of
conservatives.
The Goldwater Institute has taken action
to restore the freedom of speech on college campuses with model legislation designed to ensure free
expression within America’s public university systems. Read more about the problem in a new article by Goldwater
Institute Senior Fellow Jonathan Butcher here, and read about our solution at RestoreFreeSpeech.com.
The Arizona Department of Education’s confusing and
arbitrary handling of the state’s Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) program
is hurting thousands of families—and ESA moms are speaking out.
“I am the mother
of four children, two of whom participate in Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship
Account program,” writes Kayla Svedin in a recent Arizona Capitol Times op-ed. “That means I am one of nearly 7,000 parents whose
personal information was inadvertently disclosed by the Arizona Department of
Education. And because of the department’s utter failure to properly manage
this program, my children and thousands of children across the state are not
getting the education they deserve.”
In a separate op-ed for the Capitol Times, ESA mom Christine Accurso outlines the many ways that the Department has fallen down on the job in administering the ESA program. “The gross incompetence and negligence of the Arizona Department of Education, in the one year that this administration has been managing the ESAs, is abhorrent. The litany of problems just keeps getting longer and something needs to be done.” This is just one of many examples of gross mismanagement by the Arizona Department of Education, and we’re in court fighting others.
Read more about what these women have to say here.
