Archives

Attorney Naomi R. Shatz provided the Boston Globe with the legal backdrop for the dispute between Robert Kraft and musician Macklemore, which has been dominating the headlines this week. As Shatz explained to the Globe, the state’s Civil Rights Act applies to private individuals, and makes it illegal for private companies and people to violate constitutional rights. As she told the Globe, the state’s highest court has “made clear in various cases that canceling an existing contract because of someone’s protected speech is economic coercion that violates the law.”

The Boston Globe examined the increasing problem of middle and high school students creating AI-generated nude images of their classmates. Attorney Naomi Shatz shared her thoughts on the issue: “’Education is the best way to address it,’ Shatz said. ‘Because you want to be preventing these situations, rather than reacting to them when they happen.’”

We previously wrote about the Massachusetts law that criminalizes sharing deepfakes.

Boston University has garnered attention for its recent removal of pride flags from professors’ and department’s office windows. Attorney Naomi Shatz spoke to Boston.com about the legal implications of this action, noting that even private universities like BU can be sued under the Massachusetts Civil Rights Act if they violate constitutional rights, like the right to free expression, in ways that are threatening or coercive. Naomi also noted that the policy BU claims to be enforcing does not appear to apply outside of the context of on-campus events or demonstrations, and if the university is not applying their policies uniformly, “you’re going to have discrimination concerns and issues that they are censoring people based on the content.”

Read the full story here.

Last month in Alan L. v. Lexington Public Schools, a federal district court in Massachusetts granted a preliminary injunction requiring a Massachusetts elementary school to provide notice and an opportunity for a parent to opt his child out of lessons that touch on sexual orientation and gender identity. The decision implemented last year’s Supreme Court decision in Mahmoud v. Taylor, which held that parents have a constitutional right to opt their children out of exposure to certain materials in the classroom that conflict with the parents’ religious beliefs.

Shatz told Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly that cases like Alan L. and Mahmoud are likely to have a chilling effect in schools: “It seems unlikely that schools will have the resources, both administrative and financial, to deal with individualized opt-out requests from numerous parents on different materials or to litigate legal challenges around those opt-out requests, and instead may preemptively remove any materials that could be subject to challenges or opt-outs from the curriculum entirely,” Shatz said.

Read the full article here.