Maryville College will welcome three highly respected jurists on Tuesday, September 17, 7 p.m. in the Lambert Recital Hall of the Clayton Center for the Arts as part of Maryville College’s Constitution Day celebration.
The open-to-the-public panel will feature a discussion of four recent Supreme Court cases and their impact on one of the most sacred of Constitutional freedoms.
Retired Tennessee Supreme Court Justice Sharon G. Lee and Belmont University College of Law Associate Professor David L. Hudson Jr. will explore New Frontiers for the First Amendment: A Conversation on Notable Cases from the Supreme Court’s last term.
The Hon. W. Neal McBrayer, a judge for the Tennessee Court of Appeals and Maryville College alumnus and board member, will moderate the discussion, which will cover four recent cases heard by the Supreme Court of the United States: Lindke v. Freed; Moody v. NetChoice LLC; National Rifle Association of America v. Vullo; and Vidal v. Elster.
The cases address such topics as whether a government official’s posts on a personal social media account can be attributed to the government, when a government official’s actions amount to an unconstitutional threat or coercion to chill an organization’s free speech rights, how far the government can go in regulating social media platforms, and whether the First Amendment compels the government to register a trademark that mocks a political figure.
Justice Lee, who served as Chief Justice of the Tennessee Supreme Court from 2014 to 2016, is a native of Madisonville, Tennessee, and graduate of the University of Tennessee College of Business and the College of Law. She practiced law for 26 years in Monroe County and the surrounding area, representing individuals, business owners and municipalities.
In 2004, Gov. Phil Bredesen appointed her to serve on the Tennessee Court of Appeals. She was the first woman to serve on the Eastern Section of the Court. Four years later, Bredesen appointed her to the Tennessee Supreme Court. Lee won statewide retention elections in 2008, 2010, 2014 and 2022 before retiring from the Court in August of 2023.
Hudson, who earned an undergraduate degree from Duke University and a law degree from Vanderbilt Law School, is a fellow for the First Amendment at the Freedom Forum, where he focuses on a variety of issues including free speech, student rights and Supreme Court history.
He has authored, co-authored or co-edited more than 50 books and previously spent 17 years as an attorney and scholar at the First Amendment Center. He teaches First Amendment and Constitutional Law at the Belmont University College of Law where, in 2022, he was awarded the University Scholarship Award for superior research and the law school’s Faculty Scholarship Award. He has also taught at Vanderbilt University Law School and the Nashville School of Law.
After graduation from Maryville College, Judge McBrayer earned a J.D. degree from the College of William & Mary’s Marshall-Wythe School of Law in Williamsburg, Virginia. He practiced law for 25 years in Nashville, representing clients in commercial litigation, bankruptcy and aviation matters. In 2014, he was appointed to the Tennessee Court of Appeals by Gov. Bill Haslam.
McBrayer is a fellow of the American, Tennessee and Nashville Bar foundations and serves on the boards of the Tennessee Intercollegiate State Legislature Foundation and the Tennessee Supreme Court Historical Society. He is a member of the Federalist Society and the Harry Phillips American Inn of Court.
Maryville College contributed information for this report.
