[Air-L] public private

[burkx006 at umn.edu]

On Aug 10 2007, Ed Lamoureux wrote:

>
>On Aug 10, 2007, at 12:54 PM, Conor Schaefer wrote:
>
>> More to the point, the concourse of a mall is by my definition
>> completely public.
>
>and this would absolutely wrong and total nonsense, at least in  
>America. In American, EVERY mall is private property and is  
>specifically posted as such. No one may do research within them  
>without the express written consent of the mall owners. 

Hm, well, not completely true. In some states, malls are public fora for 
purposes of the state constitution -- the right to expression overrides the 
private property interest in those cases. The point being that it is 
dangerous to draw parallels between physical spaces and virtual spaces, 
something many of us have written about.

DLB

-- 
Dan L. Burk
Oppenheimer, Wolff & Donnelly Professor
University of Minnesota Law School
229 19th Avenue South
Minneapolis, MN  55455
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