Summary:
Professor Jorge Roig teaches Constitutional Law at Touro Law Center. On this episode of the Touro Law Review Podcast, Professor Roig discusses three recent Supreme Court decisions involving the application of the First Amendment in the context of social media.
Initially Roig discusses TikTok Inc. v. Garland decision, in which the Court upheld a law making “it unlawful for companies in the United States to provide services to distribute, maintain, or update the social media platform TikTok, unless U. S. operation of the platform is severed from Chinese control.” As Roig explains, the Court rejected the petitioners’ First Amendment claim and held that the law was “facially content neutral” and “justified by a content-neutral rationale.”
Roig then discusses Moody v. NetChoice, LLC and Murthy v. Missouri, in which the Court’s analysis of First Amendment issues is intertwined with procedural issues that led to remands back to the lower courts for further consideration of the social media platforms’ claims. In his conversation with Associate Dean Rodger Citron, Roig critiques as well as describes existing law and its application in each case.
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Learn more about Professor Jorge Roig:
Jorge R. Roig is Associate Professor of Law and Director of Neighborhood Programs at the Touro Law Center. Professor Roig’s primary areas of teaching and research are: Constitutional Law; Internet and Technology Law; Intellectual Property (including Patents, Trademarks, Copyright, Trade Secrets, and other related state law matters); and Copyright Law.
Before becoming a professor, Roig served as Judicial Clerk to then Associate Justice, later Chief Justice, Federico Hernández Denton, at the Puerto Rico Supreme Court. He also served as Judicial Clerk to United States District Judge Salvador E. Casellas at the United States District Court for the District of Puerto Rico. Professor Roig then labored in private practice at Fiddler, González & Rodríguez, P.S.C., where he worked, among other things, in complex civil litigation and intellectual property matters for corporate clients. He also served as Assistant Secretary of Justice, in charge of the Office of Legal Counsel, the Legislative Liaison’s Office, and the Contracts and Law No. 9 Division, of the Puerto Rico Department of Justice. As such, Professor Roig advised the Governor, the Secretary of Justice and the different governmental entities of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico regarding legal, communications and public policy issues of high import, including constitutional law matters such as First Amendment, Equal Protection, Due Process and privacy issues, executive appointments, separation of powers, and national security.
Roig did his undergraduate studies at Harvard University, where he concentrated in Economics, with a focus on Microeconomics, Finance, Game Theory, Derivative Pricing and Econometrics. He then obtained his Juris Doctor from the University of California at Berkeley School of Law, where he also received a “Boalt Hall Law & Technology Certificate” for his coursework in Copyrights and Trademarks, Cyberlaw, Entertainment Law, Sports Law and Art Law, and his thesis: “Speaking in Code: The Question of First Amendment Coverage of Computer Source Code.”