For reasons known only to him, Tampa's mayor Dick Greco came out heavily against lap dancing, and, in doing so, looked to the heavens and New York city mayor Rudy Giuliani as inspiration in an attempt to create another Times Square shakedown. Unfortunately, Greco didn't bother to look at Giuliani's First Amendment report card. AP did and offered this analysis.
"The hottest topic at some law schools these days is New York City's Mayor, Rudolph Giuliani, who's been sued two dozen times on First Amendment grounds and lost nearly every case.
"Lately it seems as if I could teach a First Amendment course just on Mayor Giuliani," mused Amy Adler, a professor at New York University School of Law. Professors say their favorite cases include Giuliani's attempt to cut the Brooklyn Museum of Art's funding after it displayed a painting of the Virgin Mary decorated with elephant dung.
There's also the mayor's attempt to stop New York magazine from buying ad space on city buses following its campaign poking fun at him, and the mayor's efforts to deny permits for demonstrations by groups ranging from taxi drivers to the Ku Klux Klan. "It's important in any area of the law to try to show students that what they're learning is relevant," said Michael Dorff, a Columbia Law School professor. "The beauty of living in New York is that the mayor is constantly generating classroom hypotheticals."
Non-New Yorkers are also paying attention to Giuliani, a likely future Republican U.S. Senate candidate. "He's like an archetype of the figure that the First Amendment was kind of aimed at protecting us from - the government official out of control," said Bruce Miller, a professor at Western New England College of Law in Springfield, Mass.
Robert O'Neil printed out copies of the judge's decision on the Brooklyn Museum for the class he teaches at the University of Virginia Law School.
"We were talking about prior restraint - the removal of controversial books from school and public libraries - and this helps my students appreciate the currency and vitality of these issues," O'Neil said.
Jeffrey M. Shaman, a professor at DePaul University College of Law in Chicago, says he uses the Giuliani cases "to talk about the idea that offensiveness of speech is not a reason to restrict it. And we use it to talk about the tendency of some governmental officials to overreach their authority and try to regulate speech they don't like."
Norman Siegel, the director of the New York Civil Liberties Union and party to many anti-Giuliani lawsuits, says, "The reason why I think professors are teaching Giuliani 101, in effect, is that this is a clear example of government abuse of authority," he said.
The Giuliani administration doesn't see it that way.
"The decisions made by this administration are not made against the First Amendment. They are made for independent reasons of public policy," said Daniel S. Connolly, a lawyer with the Corporation Counsel, which represents Giuliani and the city.
"If a group of taxi drivers wants to take 1,000 cars over the 59th Street Bridge at rush hour, we're going to say no for public policy reasons, not because we're against the First Amendment."
