Last month, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (disclosure: for which TheFreeForAll blogger Harvey Silverglate serves as Chairman of the Board) noted that Colorado College had punished several students who published a parody of a campus feminist publication. FIRE is now reporting that the College has denied the students' appeal.

A popular viral video making the rounds on the internet shows New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman getting hit with a pie as he begins a speech at Brown University. The Brown Daily Herald reported yesterday that one of the students was taken into custody (but then released) by Brown police, while the second, who calls himself “Captain Custard” and may not have been a Brown student, remains unidentified.

We’ve written about prior restraints before on The Free For All, in the context of a court order that prevented a Boston TV station from broadcasting the results of autopsies of firefighters killed in the line of duty. As we wrote last fall, prior restraints on speech, and especially these kinds of court injunctions limiting publication of something before it’s actually published, are the most drastic form of censorship and are strongly disfavored by the courts – or at least by courts that are reasonably versed in constitutional law.

The front page of today's Boston Herald contains a startling bit of religious bigotry that surely would not have made it past the editors had it been referring to a church other than Scientology: “Dollars For ‘Cult’ Scholars,” screamed the headline. “Hub charity gives $20G to proposed Scientology-linked school.”

There has been a lot of bleating from those who believe that boycotting the Olympic Games over The People’s Republic of China’s abysmal human rights record is in poor taste because the Olympiad is not a political event. Personally, I think that, since the Olympiad pitches itself as a symbol of fraternity and respect for individual achievement, a boycott over the choice of China as a host country is not entirely unreasonable.

The Waltham-based university named after the late and great Supreme Court Justice, Louis D. Brandeis, champion of free speech and free thought, has just achieved the dubious distinction of winning one of the “muzzle awards” given out annually by the highly respected Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression, located in Charlottesville, Virginia.