[JURIST] Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) [official website] on Thursday introduced a constitutional amendment that would exclude a corporation’s First Amendment [text] rights to spend money on political campaigns. Named the Saving American Democracy Amendment [text, PDF] the proposal would make clear that corporations are not afforded the same constitutional rights as people and that the political activities of corporations can be regulated by the government. Sanders added that the law would also ban unlimited corporate campaign contributions to candidates.

Lawyers appearing at the UK’s highest court will no longer have to wear traditional dress, it was announced today.

From now on advocates in cases heard at the Supreme Court in London will be able to “dispense with any or all of the elements of traditional court dress”.

The announcement was made by the court’s president, Lord Phillips.

Supreme Court justices do not wear legal dress themselves.

A humorous aphorism which maintains that most of any body of published material, knowledge, etc., or (more generally) of everything is worthless …

In the same week that the Supreme Court of Canada decides Crookes v Newton, I discover the following fascinating article on SSRN:

Protecting Hyperlinks and Preserving First Amendment Values on the Internet

Anjali Dalal

Yale University – Yale Information Society Project

University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law, Vol. 13, No. 4, May 2011

Hyperlinks are critical to communication in part because they facilitate access to information. They provide visitors on one website a way to navigate to internally referenced words, phrases, arguments, and ideas. In addition to being vehicles for communication, this article contends that hyperlinks are communicative in and of themselves. They signal user preferences, democratize the national dialogue, indicate credibility, function as a signature on a virtual petition and help establish virtual associations. This Article presents the first comprehensive examination of First Amendment concerns related to hyperlinks and argues that any judicial or legislative regulation of hyperlinks should be reviewed under a strict scrutiny standard. Nearly 50 years ago, the Supreme Court recognized a constitutional privilege to disseminate information in New York Times v. Sullivan. In Sullivan, the Court extended a constitutional privilege to newspapers because of their role as an incredibly important, unique medium of communication.