This year I taught my “standard” platform regulation course for something like the twelfth time. Here’s the syllabus. The course has changed a lot over the years.

Some of those changes come from real world developments. The biggest one recently is the expansion of U.S. constitutional law coverage. (To compensate, I dropped some older international human rights materials. But let the record state that those materials exist. Other parts of the world noticed some key questions years before the U.S. did!) Other changes come from my own thinking about the law or how to teach it. I’ve experimented with a lot of organizational approaches. They all have pros and cons. (Should all of Section 230 be taught together? Or should all “must-carry” law be taught together, so some 230 cases go with the First Amendment issues from Moody? Should the DMCA, CDA, and DSA be on adjacent days for comparison?)

This year I experimented with emphasizing merits liability questions more. That fits with a framework that I used in class and increasingly use in explaining platform issues outside of class.

For many questions about online speech, we need to consider (1) merits liability, (2) statutory immunities, and (3) the First Amendment. Sometimes you don’t need to analyze all three to reach your legal conclusion. But you’ll catch a lot of issues by going through the checklist. Consciously breaking out those three questions also helps in sorting out how the three interrelate, as in cases like Anderson v. TikTok.