COMM 317: National Endowment for the Arts v. Finley

In class Tuesday, we'll take up National Endowment for the Arts v. Finley, a 1998 case in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the NEA can take "decency" into account when awarding grants for artistic projects. The plaintiffs, fronted by performance artist Karen Finley, had argued it would be an unlawful prior restraint of free speech.

The language of the case is dense. (Or maybe it's me that's dense, but I couldn't follow it.) But luckily there's an interdisciplinary online education project called Freedom of Expression at the National Endowment for the Arts, partially funded by the American Bar Association's Commission on College and University Legal Studies, that has links to newspaper stories explaining the decision. The Christian Science Monitor's and The Washington Post's are especially good. It also has links to the high court's decision, *"briefs" or legal arguments filed on both sides of the case, an unoffical transcript of the oral arguments in the case and newspaper reports on the arguments.

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* An appellate court brief is not the same thing as the abstract prepared by a law student, although the same kind of legal reasoning is used in both (or should be)! They are like argumentive essays that take an issue before the court and argue why the judges should hold on their side of that issue. They are anything but brief.

Your assignment

Read the newspaper coverage, and see if you can outline a student brief on the case.

Include the following:

Style of the case. NEA v. Finley.
The facts.
The law. There are two or three floating around -- free speech, prior restraint and several others raised on both sides of the case.
The issue. The yes-or-no question the court had to decide.
The court's holding. What did it decide on that issue?
The rationale. The court's legal reasoning on the facts and the law.