Legal experts predict the National Rifle Association won’t get far in its lawsuit challenging San Francisco’s decision to brand it a terrorist group, but that could change if the city takes action against contractors that work with the NRA, according to one First Amendment scholar.

If the city cuts ties with contractors that do business with the gun rights advocate, “that would violate the First Amendment because it would punish people and entities for their association,” University of California, Berkeley, professor Erwin Chemerinsky told Courthouse News Service Tuesday.

University of California-Hastings law professor David Levine said, “I don’t think the NRA can do much about it. I think a better plaintiff would be a vendor saying you can’t do this to us.”

Read the Courthouse News Service article.

President Donald Trump’s threats against NBC for news coverage he didn’t like are not unprecedented, says Dallas First Amendment lawyer Paul C. Watler of Jackson Walker LLP.

On Wednesday, after NBC reported that sources said Trump raised the idea of increasing the U.S. nuclear arsenal, the president tweeted: “With all of the Fake News coming out of NBC and the Networks, at what point is it appropriate to challenge their License? Bad for country!”

“There is a long history of American presidents criticizing the coverage they receive in the press,” said Watler. “There is an equally long history of American journalists doing their jobs despite presidential disfavor.

“A few presidents, most notoriously Richard Nixon, actually attempted to turn their dislike of the media into official retaliation by government agencies or regulators. But those vengeful efforts at official harassment were abject failures.

“The First Amendment guarantee of freedom of the press stands as a fundamental bar to the type of vindictive action that the current president seems to contemplate or encourage. As long as we have federal judges who are true to their oaths to uphold the Constitution, media organizations should be protected from efforts to intimidate or subvert independent news reporting.”

Watler, a commercial litigator, has represented numerous news media organizations over the years in First Amendment and libel matters.

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Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch, a federal appeals court judge, is expected to face intense scrutiny over the politically incendiary topics of abortion and gun rights during confirmation hearings. However, Dallas media lawyer Shannon Teicher of Jackson Walker LLP suggests that the nominee’s record on the First Amendment is also vitally important given the new administration’s already strained relationship with the press.

In an article posted by Androvett Legal Media and Marketing, Teicher says she is “cautiously optimistic that he would be favorable on free speech issues before the court.”

“There is not a lot of case history involving Judge Gorsuch related to First Amendment issues, but it is important to look at what there is to find,” says Teicher. She points to Bustos v. A&E Networks, a case in which a prison inmate sued for defamation because he only affiliated with a gang but was not a member, as A&E had reported. Serving on the 10th Circuit Appeals Court, Gorsuch ruled that A&E’s statement was substantially true and affirmed dismissal of the lawsuit. In doing so, he explored the historical importance of truth as a defense and called it a “First Amendment imperative.”

However in an earlier decision, “Judge Gorsuch offered an interesting concurrence in Mink v. Knox, in which the court ruled a college student’s parody of a professor was protected speech.” Judge Gorsuch noted the U.S. Supreme Court had not yet ruled on whether parody is actionable when the plaintiff is neither a public figure nor the speech a matter of public concern. He believed “reasonable minds can and do differ” on the issue, so that it was best to avoid such “thickets.

Citing an opinion by then-Judge John Roberts of the D.C. Circuit (now Chief Justice of the Supreme Court), Gorsuch said he would only decide what is necessary and nothing more.

“Such careful parsing may well be a preview of the type of measured approach Judge Gorsuch would take if confirmed to the U.S. Supreme Court,” says Teicher.

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Just days after the city of Dallas filed an R-rated defense of the City Council’s vote to ban Exxxotica from the city-owned convention center, the porn expo has fired back that Dallas officials knew exactly what they were getting when they took the porn expo’s $28,080 last year, writes Robert Wilonsky for The Dallas Morning News.

The porn expo’s response is in response to a March 25 Dallas filing, which claimed Exxxotica’s organizers misrepresented the amount of nudity and sexually oriented activity that would take place during Exxxotica’s first event at the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center last August. “As far as Dallas’ attorneys are concerned, broken promises to keep women (mostly) clothed trump Exxxotica’s allegations that the City Council trampled its First Amendment rights when it voted to ban the event two months ago,” reports Wilonsky.

U.S. District Judge Sidney Fitzwater will hear Exxxotica’s motion for a preliminary injunction on April 18.

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