CFN Conference Update: Free Speech Zones Take a Beating

"Administrators are quoting law that they don't even know the basis of!" said former FIRE case subject and CFN Conference participant Isaac Rosenbloom. In 2010, Rosenbloom was barred from one of his classes and denied financial aid after a professor initiated a verbal confrontation with him over his language.

In FIRE Senior Vice President Robert Shibley's address to conference participants, he discussed case law regarding the First Amendment on campus, with help from FIRE Associate Director of Legal and Public Advocacy Azhar Majeed. The concept of free speech zones on campus took a heavy beating.

Following Robert and taking the stage presently is FIRE Vice President of Programs Adam Kissel, running through a brief history of FIRE's cases before we break for lunch.

"There's always some administrator somewhere who's going to have the other opinion on a subject and get you in trouble for it," Adam says.

Among the plethora of cases that FIRE has taken, Adam enlightens conference participants on the censorship of gun speech on college campuses, and our battle with Tarrant County College (which repeatedly violated the constitutional rights of student protesters who intended to participate in the national "Students for Concealed Carry on Campus" protest by wearing empty holsters).

After we break for lunch, we're looking forward to hearing from FIRE Director of Speech Code Research Samantha Harris.

As always, don't forget to watch the live stream, and check in on Twitter (#CFN11) and Facebook for updates.