Communications Law and Policy: Cases and Materials (Edition 8.0)

Abstract

This text has gone through eight editions across nearly a quarter century. The first edition appeared in 2001, published by Aspen Law & Business. The next three editions were published by Foundation Press, up to 2012. In 2016, Jerry Kang added Alan Butler as a co-author, and we decided to self-publish the fifth edition. Even back then the costs of legal casebooks had gotten out-of-hand, and legal publishers were doing little more than binding pages into a physical item. So, we decided to cut out the intermediary and provide substantial cost savings for students. In 2023, Blake Reid joined the author team, and we took the further step of releasing edition 7.5 of the book as a free PDF under a Creative Commons license. We’ve now reached the substantially revised eighth edition.

Throughout all editions, the book has retained one fundamental pedagogical principle: Organize learning first by concepts, then by industry. Our goal has been to prioritize a deeper conceptual understanding over industry-specific details because industries, and the technologies that make them possible, are always in flux. The current list of concepts is: (1) power, (2) entry, (3) pricing, (4) indecent content, (5) access, (6) classification, (7) internet platforms, and (8) privacy. The book devotes a chapter to each concept, with the first four chapters exploring a particular concept across multiple industries ranging from legacy telephony, broadcast, and cable TV to modern day internet. Chapters 5 and 6 jointly tackle the concepts of access and classification, with Chapter 5 focusing particularly on access issues in legacy industries and Chapter 6 examining how the legal classification of internet service providers has shaped access policy in the context of net neutrality. Chapter 7 shifts upward in the internet’s layer stack, to explore the responsibility of internet platforms for the content that they host. The final chapter surveys communications privacy topics that are appropriate for both communications law courses and privacy law courses. Although law and technology have evolved over the past quarter century, the book’s pedagogical commitments have remained the same, even as we have updated, simplified, and pruned.

One word of caution to faculty and students alike: the Supreme Court’s titanic decisions in Loper Bright and NetChoice on the last opinion day of the 2023–2024 term (just weeks before the release of this edition) are likely to have enormous, difficult-to-predict impacts on the future of American communications law. We have done our level best in this edition’s updates to set the table for vibrant conversations in your classrooms about the shifting administrative and constitutional law foundations of this field. But caveat emptor: things may evolve significantly and unpredictably over the next year. We encourage an especially high degree of situational awareness.

Keywords: Telecommunications Law, Communications Law, First Amendment, Privacy Law, Internet Law