The IfRFA application is officially live!

Hi there!

Welcome to your every-so-often update from IfRFA. We're glad you're here.

Our application for law student fellows is open for summer 2020. We can’t wait to award $10,000 in summer funding to current 1Ls or 2Ls who want to learn more about the First Amendment! If that’s you, please apply! And if not, please distribute information about our program far and wide!

What’s happening now: 

We’ve had a busy two months since our official launch. Sybil has done amazing work getting the IfRFA website up and looking fantastic. Check it out! And make sure to read or listen to the image descriptions, which contain a window into Kendra’s views on everyone’s headshots.

A fun IfRFA fact for all of y’all - we played around with a whole bunch of potential highlight images before deciding on a picture of Diana K. Moore’s Justice from outside the Martin Luther King Jr. Federal Courthouse in Newark, New Jersey. Kendra picked this image in particular because it’s more androgynous and less white-looking than most other statutes of Justice.

Around the outside of the sculpture of Justice is the following poem, written by Mark Strand, the 1990 U.S. Poet Laureate.

“When justice does its public part, it educates the human heart.

The erring human heart in turn, must do its private part and learn."

It feels pretty appropriate, no?

In non-website news, Sarah Jeong, Nani Jansen Reventlow, Jasmine McNealy, Heather Pickerell, and April “Kit” Walsh have agreed to serve as our inaugural advisory board for the Initiative. We’re honored to have them guide our efforts. Their bios (and a freedom of expression issue they each wish got more attention) are all on our new website!

What’s up next: 

We’ll be doing outreach to make sure our call for application goes far and wide! Please help us by passing it along to folks you think might be good candidates, or reaching out to us with suggestions about where to push it out. 

We’re also going to be starting planning for our March workshop, where our incoming fellows class will get the opportunity to be in conversation with thinkers and doers on freedom of expression.

What’s on our minds: 

The Supreme Court’s grant of cert in United States v. Evelyn Sineneng-Smith. 

To back up, as you may know, the Supreme Court gets to decide whether it reviews most of the cases on its docket. Parties that want their cases to be reviewed by the Supreme Court file what’s called a “writ of certiorari.” It’s pronounced “cert-she-or-roar-i” or “cert-she-or-rare-i”, depending on which SCOTUS justice you want to emulate. Kendra follows Elena Kagan and calls it “cert.” If four of the justices want to review the cases, the writ gets “granted.” So a grant of certiorari means that the Supreme Court has decided to take a case.

Although there can be many reasons that SCOTUS would grant cert, one of the most common is because at least four justices think the lower court decision is wrong and want to reverse it. That’s particularly worrying in the case of US v. Sineneng-Smith, which as Lorelei Laird pointed out in Slate concerns a provision of immigration law that forbids “encourag[ing] or induc[ing] an alien to … reside in the United States” if the speaker knows that the “alien” does not have legal status. The Ninth Circuit (an appellate court that governs much of the West Coast) held that the provision was unconstitutional because it covered a wide variety of protected speech. In the decision, the Ninth Circuit gave a number of examples, including that “a loving grandmother who urges her grandson to overstay his visa by telling him “I encourage you to stay’” could run afoul of this legal provision, creating the possibility of criminal charges. Too broad, says the Ninth Circuit, and finds the whole thing facially unconstitutional. 

But the Supreme Court’s grant creates reason to worry. Although prosecutions under the provision at issue in the case are rare, there have been allegations that ICE targets activists, particularly based on protected speech. For now, all we can do is wait and see what will happen in the case. After a cert grant, both parties file briefing, and then there will be oral arguments in front of the Court. 

We’ll keep you updated. Until then, please spread our application, check out our new website, and keep in touch!

Kendra and Sybil