Facts
Hardwick was living at the time with his wife and young family in Derby as part of a field trip into the Great Sandy Desert in the far north-west of Western Australia. As far as can be ascertained, Hardwick was studying in a different department, had not experienced any professional differences with Dr Rindos, and in fact hardly knew him beyond Rindos' insistence on being granted tenure, the Rindos affair.
Hardwick's email seeking to clarify the situation in the midst of global hysteria among homosexual academics and their supporters being incited by the case was posted to the Usenet newsgroup sci.anthropology in response to prolonged haranguing of the group by Rindos and his supporters.
The background controversy was apparently concerned with preferential homosexual and lesbian engagement between staff and selected students; and more generally over the disruption to their studies caused by radical changes wrought by the then Hawke Federal Labor Government. Whether this had any bearing on the University's repeated refusal to grant Rindos tenure is not known, beyond the fact that the tenure system was being phased out in any event to be replaced by the system of contract now in use.
Spamming is the use of messaging systems to send multiple unsolicited messages (spam) to large numbers of recipients for the purpose of commercial advertising, for the purpose of non-commercial proselytizing, for any prohibited purpose, or simply repeatedly sending the same message to the same user. While the most widely recognized form of spam is email spam, the term is applied to similar abuses in other media: instant messaging spam, Usenet newsgroup spam, Web search engine spam, spam in blogs, wiki spam, online classified ads spam, mobile phone messaging spam, Internet forum spam, junk fax transmissions, social spam, spam mobile apps, television advertising and file sharing spam. It is named after Spam, a luncheon meat, by way of a Monty Python sketch about a restaurant that has Spam in almost every dish in which Vikings annoyingly sing "Spam" repeatedly.
In a legal dispute, one party has the burden of proof to show that they are correct, while the other party had no such burden and is presumed to be correct. The burden of proof requires a party to produce evidence to establish the truth of facts needed to satisfy all the required legal elements of the dispute.
Romer v. Evans, 517 U.S. 620 (1996), is a landmark United States Supreme Court case dealing with sexual orientation and state laws. It was the first Supreme Court case to address gay rights since Bowers v. Hardwick (1986), when the Court had held that laws criminalizing sodomy were constitutional.
Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558 (2003), is a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in which the Court ruled that most sanctions of criminal punishment for consensual, adult non-procreative sexual activity are unconstitutional. The Court reaffirmed the concept of a "right to privacy" that earlier cases, had found the U.S. Constitution provides, even though it is not explicitly enumerated. It based its ruling on the notions of personal autonomy to define one's own relationships and of American traditions of non-interference with private sexual decisions between consenting adults.
Bowers v. Hardwick, 478 U.S. 186 (1986), was a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court that upheld, in a 5–4 ruling, the constitutionality of a Georgia sodomy law criminalizing oral and anal sex in private between consenting adults, in this case with respect to homosexual sodomy, though the law did not differentiate between homosexual sodomy and heterosexual sodomy. The case was overturned in 2003 in Lawrence v. Texas, though the statute had already been struck down by the Georgia Supreme Court in 1998. Bowers is today considered to be among the worst rulings ever penned by the Supreme Court, particularly for its perceived poor legal reasoning and vitriolic rhetoric against the LGBT community. The Encyclopædia Britannica states "that scholarly commentary on the decision [has] overwhelmingly regarded the dissenters in Bowers as having made the better legal arguments." Several justices, including Lewis F. Powell, later expressed regrets joining the majority but stated that they considered the decision of little importance at the time.
Harry Andrew Blackmun was an American lawyer and jurist who served as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1970 to 1994. Appointed by Republican President Richard Nixon, Blackmun ultimately became one of the most liberal justices on the Court. He is best known as the author of the Court's opinion in Roe v. Wade.
Google Groups is a service from Google that provides discussion groups for people sharing common interests. The Groups service also provides a gateway to Usenet newsgroups via a shared user interface.
Academic freedom is a moral and legal concept expressing the conviction that the freedom of inquiry by faculty members is essential to the mission of the academy as well as the principles of academia, and that scholars should have freedom to teach or communicate ideas or facts without fear of repression, job loss, or imprisonment. While the core of academic freedom covers scholars acting in an academic capacity - as teachers or researchers expressing strictly scholarly viewpoints -, an expansive interpretation extends these occupational safeguards to scholars' speech on matters outside their professional expertise. Especially within the anglo-saxon discussion it is most commonly defined as a type of freedom of speech, while the current scientific discourse in the Americas and Continental Europe more often define it as a human right with freedom of speech just being one aspect among many within the concept of academic freedom.
Eisenstadt v. Baird, 405 U.S. 438 (1972), was a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court that established the right of unmarried people to possess contraception on the same basis as married couples.
The Colorado Supreme Court is the highest court in the U.S. state of Colorado. Located in Denver, the Court consists of a Chief Justice and six Associate Justices.
The Consenting Adult Sex Bill is a consenting adult law, passed in California in 1975 and effective in January 1976, that repealed the sodomy law in California so that it applied only in criminal situations and made gay sex legal for the first time. George Moscone, an early proponent of gay rights, in conjunction with his friend and ally in the Assembly, Willie Brown, managed to get the bill passed, 21-20, repealing the existing Californian laws against sodomy. The amendment was signed into law by California Governor Jerry Brown. The Assembly had a much easier time passing the bill, with final vote on AB 489 being 45-26. Gov. Brown signed the bill on May 12, 1975.
Make Money Fast is a title of an electronically forwarded chain letter created in 1988 which became so infamous that the term is often used to describe all sorts of chain letters forwarded over the Internet, by e-mail spam, or in Usenet newsgroups. In anti-spammer slang, the name is often abbreviated "MMF".
A sodomy law is a law that defines certain sexual acts as crimes. The precise sexual acts meant by the term sodomy are rarely spelled out in the law, but are typically understood by courts to include any sexual act deemed to be "unnatural" or "immoral". Sodomy typically includes anal sex, oral sex, and bestiality. In practice, sodomy laws have rarely been enforced against heterosexual couples, and have mostly been used to target homosexual couples.
Religious Technology Center v. Netcom On-Line Communication Services, Inc., 907 F. Supp. 1361, is a U.S. district court case about whether the operator of a computer bulletin board service ("BBS") and Internet access provider that allows that BBS to reach the Internet should be liable for copyright infringement committed by a subscriber of the BBS. The plaintiff Religious Technology Center ("RTC") argued that defendant Netcom was directly, contributorily, and vicariously liable for copyright infringement. Netcom moved for summary judgment, disputing RTC's claims and raising a First Amendment argument and a fair use defense. The district court of the Northern District of California concluded that RTC's claims of direct and vicarious infringement failed, but genuine issues of fact precluded summary judgment on contributory liability and fair use.
The Rindos affair was an academic scandal that occurred at the University of Western Australia.
Cook v. Gates, 528 F.3d 42, is a decision on July 9, 2008, of the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit that upheld the "Don't ask, Don't tell" (DADT) policy against due process and equal protection Fifth Amendment challenges and a free speech challenge under the First Amendment, and which found that no earlier Supreme Court decision held that sexual orientation is a suspect or quasi-suspect classification.
University of Pennsylvania v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, 493 U.S. 182 (1990), is a US labor law case of the US Supreme Court holding neither common law evidentiary privilege, nor First Amendment academic freedom protects peer review materials that are relevant to charges of racial or sexual discrimination in tenure decisions.
Doe v. Commonwealth's Attorney of Richmond, 425 U.S. 901 (1976), is a decision by the Supreme Court of the United States which gave summary affirmation of a lower court ruling which upheld the U.S. state of Virginia's ban on homosexual sodomy.
Briginshaw v Briginshaw (Briginshaw) is a decision of the High Court of Australia which considered how the requisite standard of proof should operate in civil proceedings.
