Judge Garland has authored a number of First Amendment opinions—here, we’ve selected five that cover a wide spectrum. In Lee v. Department of Justice, 428 F.3d 299 (2005) (Garland, J., dissenting), Judge Garland voted against denial of rehearing en banc in the Wen Ho Lee case, arguing that the panel’s application of the Privacy Act would have chilling effects on the press. And in Initiative and Referendum Institute v. U.S. Postal Service, 417 F.3d 1299 (2005), he voted to reverse a district court which upheld a Postal Service regulation banning petition signature collection outside of post offices.
However, in three cases he sided against finding a speech restriction to be impermissible. National Association of Manufacturers v. Taylor, 582 F.3d 1 (2009) rejected a facial and as applied challenge to a federal statute requiring disclosure of organizations contributing money to registered lobbyists and actively participating in their lobbying activities. In Mpoy v. Rhee, 758 F.3d 285 (2014), he found a schoolteacher’s e-mail reporting classroom problems not to be protected by the First Amendment. And most recently, in Wagner v. Federal Election Commission, 793 F.3d 1 (2015), he authored an opinion rejecting a challenge to a statute barring federal contractors from making federal campaign contributions.
We’ve included two detainee cases, Saleh v. Titan Corp., 580 F.3d 1 (2009), where Garland discussed federal preemption in a case involving abuses at Abu Ghraib prison, and Parhat v. Gates, 532 F.3d 834 (2008), a review of a Combatant Status Review Tribunal’s classification of an ethnic Uighur as an enemy combatant. Finally, we’ve included Rancho Viejo, LLC v. Norton, 323 F.3d 1062 (2003), a Commerce Clause case.