On Constitution Day, California College Student Ordered to Stop Handing out Constitutions
Posted: 09/19/2013 11:50 am
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Robert Van Tuinen, a student at Modesto Junior College in California, had a theory. He believed that the policies at his college limiting protests and expression were so restrictive that the college would try to shut him down even if he tried to hand out copies of the United States Constitution on September 17--Constitution Day.

Sadly, he was correct.

You can check out the video for yourself

Not 10 minutes after Van Tuinen began handing out copies of the Constitution, a campus police officer arrived to stop him. Van Tuinen was informed that anytime someone wants to pass out anything on campus, it must first be registered and approved by the Student Development office.

As my organization, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), writes in a press release today:

Upon arriving at that office, Van Tuinen talks with administrator Christine Serrano, who tells him that because of "a time, place, and manner," he can only pass out literature inside the "free speech area," which she informs him is "in front of the student center, in that little cement area." She asks him to fill out an application and asks to photocopy his student ID. Hauling out a binder, Serrano says that she has "two people on campus right now, so you'd have to wait until either the 20th, 27th, or you can go into October." Van Tuinen protests that he wants to pass out the Constitution on Constitution Day, at which point Serrano dismissively tells him "you really don't need to keep going on."

Ultimately, Serrano, after a phone call to an unnamed person in which she says that Van Tuinen "just wants to question the authority of why can't he hand out constitutional-type of papers," tells him he will have to make an appointment with Vice President of Student Services Brenda Thames, so that she can further explain to him "what the time, place, and manner is."

Van Tuinen's difficulty in trying to engage in basic expressive activities protected by the First Amendment on campus is no isolated incident. Just last week I published a list of 11 student victories over absurd, tiny, and out-of-the-way "free speech zones" on campus and FIRE released a video about one of those victories and the general problem with free speech zones on and off campus.

Yes, it is true that campuses can impose what are known as "reasonable time, place, and manner" restrictions on speech. But under the law, these need to be reasonable, tied to the pedagogical interest of the college, narrowly tailored, and leave open ample avenues to engage in free speech. Modesto's all-too-typical behavior here does not pass this test or conform with basic common sense. It almost seems like something Mark Twain would say; "This college is so daffy, I bet you they wouldn't even let you pass out constitutions on Constitution day." And amazingly, he would win that bet.

The U.S. Constitution as Open Data? Not this Constitution Day.
by Matthew Rumsey Sept. 17, 2013, 1:12 p.m.
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Today is Constitution Day. On this date in 1787, delegates to the Constitutional Convention met to sign the document they created. We live in the world’s oldest continuous constitutional democracy, and our written constitution — as interpreted by the courts and fleshed out by Congress — governs us still.

How has the Constitution been interpreted over the years? Congress charged its library with publishing an explanation of the document as it has been interpreted by the Supreme Court. This legal treatise, known as The Constitution of the United States, Analysis and Interpretation, or simply Constitution Annotated, is published as a full volume once a decade, with updates released every two years. The legal research behind the Constitution Annotated goes on continuously, and a website maintained inside Congress — available to staff only — is kept up-to-date in real time.

We believe the public should have the benefit of these ongoing updates - and Congress’ Joint Committee on Printing agreed. The Committee directed the Library of Congress and the Government Printing Office to make the Constitution Annotated available online to the public as it is updated. Earlier today, GPO released the treatise on an iPhone app and website. Unfortunately, the effort falls short of the mark.

While it is laudable that GPO is pushing information to mobile devices, the iPhone implementation fails to make use of the advantages that platform provides, with a resulting app that is difficult to read and hard to navigate. The webpage containing downloadable PDF files similarly fails to take advantage of the benefits of internet publication.

Troublingly, re-publishers of the Constitution Annotated that traditionally have made the treatise available in user-friendly formats, such as Cornell’s Legal Information Institute, will have to undertake significant effort to transform the PDFs into useful formats, particularly as the underlying data is not published as structured data. By contrast, when the government publishes information as structured data, as we have seen with the publication of the entire US code as well as the Federal Register in XML, tremendous value is created that benefits everyone.

GPO should publish updates to the Constitution Annotated in a structured, machine readable format to help the public realize the full benefits of up-to-date access to the legal treatise. While we are pleased that GPO and the Library of Congress worked together to develop a digital edition of the Constitution Annotated,” in the future, they should consult with re-publishers and end users to make sure they meet everyone’s needs.

So today, on Constitution Day, we are writing again to the Government Printing Office and the Library of Congress to urge them to publish the Constitution Annotated online, in real-time, in a format that everyone can use.