First Circuit Strikes Down Puerto Rico Ban on Certain Knowingly False Statements During Declared Emergencies
Free Speech First Circuit Strikes Down Puerto Rico Ban on Certain Knowingly False Statements During Declared Emergencies Eugene Volokh | 8.6.2026 8:01 AM Rodríguez-Cotto v. The court concluded that the law was content-based, and didn't fit within existing First Amendment exceptions (such as the defamation exception). It also concluded that the law wouldn't fit within any special latitude provided by the extent Justice Breyer's two-Justice concurrence in U.S. v.
- ▪Free Speech First Circuit Strikes Down Puerto Rico Ban on Certain Knowingly False Statements During Declared Emergencies Eugene Volokh | 8.6.2026 8:01 AM Rodríguez-Cotto v.
- ▪The court concluded that the law was content-based, and didn't fit within existing First Amendment exceptions (such as the defamation exception).
- ▪It also concluded that the law wouldn't fit within any special latitude provided by the extent Justice Breyer's two-Justice concurrence in U.S. v.
Reason Magazine files mainly under politics. We currently carry 520 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
inspect →
Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Reason.com |
| Canonical URL | https://reason.com/volokh/2026/08/06/first-circuit-strikes-down-puerto-rico-ban-on-certain-knowingly-false-statements-during-declared-emergencies/ |
| Publication time | Thu, 06 Aug 2026 12:01:11 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-08-06T12:22:56.719Z |
| Last seen | 2026-08-06T12:22:56.719Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | EFyTfuJ2uPxE · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Free Speech First Circuit Strikes Down Puerto Rico Ban on Certain Knowingly False Statements During Declared Emergencies Eugene Volokh | 8.6.2026 8:01 AM Rodríguez-Cotto v. González-Colón, decided Tuesday by First Circuit Judges Gustavo Gelpí and Seth Aframe and Seventh Circuit Judge David Hamilton, struck down a Puerto Rico law (Article 5.14(a)) that makes it a crime "to purposefully, knowingly, or recklessly," "during a governor-declared state emergency or disaster," [g]ive[ ] a warning or false alarm, knowing that the information is false, in relation to the imminent occurrence of a catastrophe in Puerto Rico, or disseminate[ ], publish[ ], transmit[ ], transfer[ ] or circulate[ ] through any means of communication, including the media, social networks, or any other means of…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Reason.com.
Discussion
0 commentsMore from Reason.com
