‘1st Amendment retaliation’ / Butter up / Netflix takes the 1st

On campus …

Hey, kids! Free speech! The Free Speech Center and the Poynter Institute are teaming up to get First Amendment education tools into college students’ hands.

■ The Freedom Forum’s Rick Mastroianni encourages college students to embrace the First: “Take a risk and make a new friend who disagrees with you.”

■ A federal judge has tossed a First Amendment lawsuit filed by a woman voted out of her vice presidency on the San Francisco school board over her anti-Asian tweets.

■ A Princeton politics professor ponders the First Amendment implications for limits on University of Iowa professors in the pandemic: “You may only make statements regarding mask usage or vaccinations in the context of course material discussions of health-related issues.”

Butter up. A California creamery has won a First Amendment fight in federal court to keep using dairy terms including “butter,” “cheese” and “lactose-free” on its cashew-based products.

■ A federal appeals court says an Iowa law designed to protect industrial animal farms from undercover investigations is so broad as to violate the First Amendment.

■ Animal-rights advocates won a similar fight in Arkansas.

What’s covered, what’s not.

■ A federal appeals court says Indiana’s corrections department didn’t violate a prisoner’s First Amendment rights in blocking a sexually explicit image sent by his fiancée.

■ North Dakota’s Supreme Court says the First doesn’t protect a man who sent hundreds of vulgar phone messages to police officers …

■ … and a Colorado appeals court says it doesn’t protect a man who sent a musician repeated threatening Facebook messages …

■ … but a California appeals court says it does protect long-term facility workers who “repeatedly fail to use a resident’s preferred name or pronouns.”

‘Clearly unconstitutional.’ A UCLA law professor is sounding the alarm about a California bill that would threaten jail and fines for those protesting at vaccination sites.

■ Police have released images of a man sought in connection with a stabbing during a vaccine protest in downtown Los Angeles.

First Amendment ‘weaponization.’ Writing in The Washington Post, a couple of law professors—one from Harvard, one from Boston University—“like the result” of a federal judge’s decision to block a Florida ban on vaccine requirements for cruise ship passengers, but they consider the ruling’s reliance on free-speech rights “worrisome.”

■ Florida’s governor sees that aspect of the ruling the same way.

Netflix takes the First. A federal judge says the company’s First Amendment rights won’t keep it from facing a lawsuit filed by an ex-Manhattan prosecutor who says she was defamed as a villain in the docudrama series When They See Us.

■ Her lawyer cites five scenes that portray her “engaging in coercive and discriminatory conduct … to build a case against innocent young men of color.”