76th Annual Seigenthaler-Sutherland Cup National First Amendment Moot Court Competition

Ratified in 1791 as part of the Bill of Rights, the First Amendment prohibits Congress from enacting laws abridging the freedoms of religion, speech, press, assembly, and petition. Its protections were initially understood to constrain only the federal government, but through the doctrine of incorporation under the Fourteenth Amendment — beginning with Gitlow v. New York (1925) — the Supreme Court extended these guarantees against state and local governments as well. Over the twentieth century, landmark rulings such as Schenck v. United States (1919), Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969), New York Times v. Sullivan (1964), Tinker v. Des Moines (1969), and Texas v. Johnson (1989) constructed a robust framework protecting political speech, press freedom, symbolic expression, and dissent, while carving out narrow exceptions for incitement, true threats, defamation, obscenity, and fighting words. Contemporary First Amendment doctrine confronts pressures the framers could not have anticipated. Digital platforms have transformed who speaks, who moderates, and who listens, raising questions about state action, compelled speech, and platform liability that the Court addressed in Moody v. NetChoice (2024) and Murthy v. Missouri (2024). Campus speech controversies, protest restrictions, religious accommodation under cases like Kennedy v. Bremerton School District (2022), campaign finance after Citizens United v. FEC (2010), and the regulation of misinformation continue to test the doctrine's boundaries. Moot court problems in this area typically require advocates to apply tiered scrutiny — strict scrutiny for content-based restrictions, intermediate scrutiny for content-neutral time, place, and manner regulations — and to navigate the public forum doctrine, the Free Exercise and Establishment Clauses, and evolving categories of unprotected speech. As a purely domestic U.S. constitutional matter, the First Amendment is shaped by a single sovereign rather than competing states. The relevant 'actor' is the United States, whose federal courts, executive agencies, and state governments together generate the case law and regulatory environment under which free expression claims are litigated.