How did nineteenth-century federal legislators imagine Mormon polygamy as they debated and adopted harsh anti-polygamy enforcement laws? Republican anti-polygamists in the Reconstruction era called polygamy and slavery the “twin relics of barbarism,” analogizing polygamous husbands to Southern slaveholders. By the 1880s anti-polygamists in Congress rooted their arguments in Chinese Exclusionism and avoided divisive references to Southern slavery. They compared Mormon polygamy to “despotic” cultural practices popularly associated with Chinese immigrants, like concubinage, prostitution, and “coolieism.” White cultural nationalism mobilized support for the first effective anti-polygamy statutes in 1882 and 1887. These changing representations of polygamy illustrate how the Republican party came to terms with the South’s legacy of slavery and rebellion by embracing a unified white cultural identity. Metaphorical comparisons to Southern slavery and “oriental paganism” not only vilified polygamy, they also justified federal intervention into local affairs. The these vivid metaphors arose from the Republican party’s shifting ideology, not the lived experience of polygamy’s perceived “victims”: the plural wives.
Note
Unmasking John Doe: Setting a Standard for Discovery in Anonymous Internet Defamation Cases
The First Amendment to the United States Constitution provides for and protects an open marketplace for the competition of ideas. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. said, “the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market[.]” The Internet, where anonymity is easily achieved and speech is cheap, seems to be a broader and more pure manifestation of such a marketplace than previously seen. In the 1990s, the Internet was a new mode of communication and an untested medium for speech. The intersection of First Amendment law and defamation law in cyberspace has since posed a variety of legal questions that continue to develop nearly two decades later. How should the fundamental right to freedom of speech play out over a medium where anyone’s voice can be heard instantaneously by thousands, even millions, of people? Who should be liable for defamatory speech occurring over the Internet? When is it appropriate to compel disclosure of a “John Doe” defendant’s identity in a defamation case?
Unmasking John Doe contends that to answer those questions requires a precarious balancing act. Using a hypothetical John Doe lawsuit, the note develops and rigorously tests an obscure standard provided by a Louisiana court, arguing that it may provide the key to ensuring that Internet speakers know the limits of protection guaranteed to them and that meritorious claims of defamation will not be prematurely dismissed.
Consumerism and Information Privacy: How Upton Sinclair Might Once Again Protect Us From Ourselves (And Why We Should Let Him)
This Note will address the salience of a simple analogy: will privacy law be for the information age what consumer protection law was for the industrial age? At the height of industrialization, the market faced instability caused by a lack of consumer competence, lack of disclosure about product defects, and advancements in technology that exacerbated the market’s flaws. As this Note will show, these same causes of market failure are stirring in today’s economy as well. The modern economy is not one of goods but of information, and although consumers have long been aware that their personal information may have marketing value, the internet has fundamentally changed the scope and depth of information collection, exposing more consumers than ever to injuries that require not just a more comprehensive remedy, but a wholesale change in the level of care for the information industry. Just as the mass-production economy precipitated a wave of reforms in consumer protection, in part thanks to a kick-start by author Upton Sinclair, so too must the mass-information economy adapt. After demonstrating the parallels between the problems of today with those of yesterday, this Note will propose parallel solutions, particularly a consolidation of regulatory power and a new tort for breach of information privacy, the latter of which draws its inspiration from general products liability. These proposals show that rather than reinvent the wheel, modern lawmakers can (and should) answer today’s problems with lessons from the last century.