Though I am very unlikely to do any of them, I now understand that to communicate with another you can email, tweet, retweet, subtweet, poke, chat, snap, vine, pin, post, YouTube and a host of other things that seemingly change daily. In a recent case, Anthony Elonis argued to the U.S. Supreme Court that when he posted horrific things on his Facebook page about what he thought of and wanted to do to his wife, he was advancing his interest in becoming a rapper and exercising his First Amendment rights of self-expression rather than harassing and threatening his wife as he had been accused of doing.
It was amusing to read about how the justices at oral argument wrestled with whether his rantings were artistic expression or criminal or tortious conduct cynically wrapped in the mantle of free speech to avoid criminal jeopardy. Fitting the round pegs of new forms of media into the square holes of old rules, laws and norms is a huge challenge, and not one that is going to go away anytime soon. And it’s a problem that we in lawyer ethics see more and more.
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