Prof. Eugene Volokh | TALKING BACK to restraining orders

Above, Prof. Eugene Volokh argues before the Georgia Supreme Court in Chan v. Ellis (2014). Prof. Volokh teaches free speech law, religious freedom law, church-state relations law, a First Amendment Amicus Brief Clinic, and tort law at UCLA School of Law.

“If you post on social media about your life, is that going against a restraining order if you don’t mention the petitioner’s name?”

—Search term that led someone here last week

As UCLA Law Prof. Eugene Volokh has doggedly emphasized in his blog, The Volokh Conspiracy (formerly hosted by The Washington Post), the answer to this question is no, it isn’t going against a restraining order if you write ABOUT the order, ABOUT the person who petitioned it, or ABOUT the impact it’s had on your life. Your right to express your opinions and talk about your life to the public at large is protected by the First Amendment.

A person may legitimately be prohibited by a judge from communicating something TO someone (by phone or text, say, or by email or in a letter, or in person), but a judge “can’t order someone to just stop saying anything about a person.”

The citizen’s right to talk about him- or herself, about someone else (including by name), or about anything (excepting state secrets) is sacrosanct. It’s protected by the First Amendment, and a trial judge has no rightful authority to contradict the Constitution.

Note that the key phrase here is rightful authority. A judge can act in ignorance, and s/he can even act in willful contravention of the law.

Why Eugene Volokh’s is a name to know is that Prof. Volokh has endeavored to make the distinction between speech that may be prohibited and speech that may not be prohibited everyday knowledge. He’s done that by writing in a medium accessible to everybody, a blog, rather than exclusively in law journals, as well as by framing in simplest terms the difference between speech that may be censored and speech that may not be.

He’s building steam, too. These posts are from last month alone:

It’s important to observe that nothing in the restraining order arena is hard-and-fast, because judges can rule however they want. When what they do clashes with the law, an abused defendant’s only recourse is to appeal, and the intrepid writer should be prepared to do that…right on up the ladder. (S/he should also know that s/he has the right to request reimbursement for lost time, for costs, etc.)

A blogger wrote last month to report that an ex-boyfriend’s claims of “domestic violence” were laughed out of court and that the motive for the accusations was that she had criticized him in a blog. The guy went back to the courthouse a couple of weeks later, petitioned another order from a different judge, and that one stuck. His abuse of process had recent precedent, and it didn’t matter.

Such manipulations of the justice system by false complainants and spongy decision-making by judges owe to 20 years of mainstream feminist rhetoric decrying “epidemic” violence. Judges have been trained according to tailored social science and had it impressed upon them what their priorities should be. Too, they’ve traditionally been given no cause to second-guess themselves.

Eugene Volokh is changing that.

A steady stream of cogent arguments against the due process violations (and statutory and conditioned inequities) that make the restraining order process contemptible has been voiced by influential critics since the ’90s…to little effect.

Rather than appeals to reason and social conscience, what may finally turn the tide against a corrupt procedure of law is an indirect attack on its legitimacy. Once it’s commonly known that speech about its victims’ experiences cannot lawfully be squelched, and that both the issuers of orders and their petitioners can be exposed, warts and all, what has been an unaccountable process no longer will be. Shadowy (and shady) proceedings that have enjoyed invisibility will have to tolerate the glare of spotlights.

And bullies don’t like reading about themselves.

*The motives of a goodly proportion of false complainants are to cause pain and have the party they’ve injured gagged. Restraining orders are the perfect tool for this. But what people say on public record (e.g., in a courtroom) is public property. It’s supposed to be the opposite of hush-hush.

Courts are properly authorized to sanction acts of defamation—publicly lying about someone—but they’re not authorized to prohibit truthful speech or opinion (even if it’s negative), and they’re not authorized to prohibit speech acts before they’ve even been committed. An order of the court that prohibits future speech is called a prior restraint, and it’s unconstitutional (see the First Amendment).

With civil harassment orders, things get knotty. A prior restraint may not be expressed; it may be implicit.

When a “protective order” is in effect, it prohibits speech to someone but not speech about that person, per se, as law professors Aaron Caplan and Eugene Volokh have emphasized. A court, however, may conclude that speech about someone (any speech about that person) is “harassment,” and it may label that speech a violation of the “protective order,” and rule that a defendant be remanded to jail.

Several people have reported on this site that they were jailed or had orders of the court extended because of publications online or, in one case, for posting flyers about an accuser’s conduct. Many have reported, too, that the basis of the “protective order” against them was speech about a person (in one recently shared account, a woman complained on a county bulletin board about her neighbors’ shabby treatment of their dog).

So you have instances where people are issued restraining orders for lawfully exercising their First Amendment privilege to free speech, and you have instances where people who’ve been issued restraining orders are sanctioned for lawfully exercising their First Amendment privilege to free speech.

Trial judges aren’t First Amendment authorities and may not have graduated from college, let alone have law degrees. Furthermore, protecting the free speech of people they’ve labeled abusers is hardly an urgent concern of theirs.

Here’s what a prior restraint looks like:

Arizona prior restraint order, First Amendment law

Orders like this don’t expressly forbid criticism of the government. They forbid criticism of people who exploited a process of government. This, by extension, forbids criticism of the government.

This order was issued against me in 2013 when I was sued for libel and harassment in the Superior Court of Arizona by a married woman who had falsely accused me to the police and several judges years prior. She was someone I scarcely knew who had hung around outside of my house at night (what that might suggest to you is what it should suggest to you). Her original claims to the court (2006) were to obtain an injunction to prohibit me from communicating her conduct to anyone, and her claims to the court in 2013 were to obtain an injunction to prohibit me from communicating her conduct to anyone.

The motive for both prosecutions was the same: cover-up. (Try to imagine what it is to fight false accusations for seven years, daily, while everything around you erodes, and then have some trial judge offhandedly tell you you’re lying and should be gagged. The judge had plainly made up his mind how he would rule before ever setting foot in court. The trial nevertheless dragged out from March to October. Today I avoid using the road where I rented the private mailbox to which the judge’s arbitrary conclusions and fiats were mailed, so nauseous is the association.)

Some of my accuser’s testimony is here, and the contradictoriness of her claims, as well as the motive for them, will be evident from no words other than her own. Does it matter that her misrepresentations are self-evident? No. Does it matter that they ridicule process of law and mock the court? No.

All that matters is that those who’ve been misrepresented are silenced to preserve the image of propriety.

TALKING BACK to restraining orders

THEY’RE NOT JUST ABUSED BUT ABUSIVE

Tag Prof. Eugene Volokh

Another Way False Testimony Is Concealed: The Unconstitutional “Prior Restraint”