At Minding the Campus, John Rosenberg writes of the turmoil over the Redskins and cites an excellent point by Professor Eugene Volokh.

Is “Tolerance” The New “Diversity”?

The politically correct speech enforcers at the Patent and Trademark office have just voted, for the second time, to cancel several Washington Redskins trademarks that contain the term “Redskins” because Section 2(a) of the Lanham Act “prohibits registration of marks that may disparage persons or bring them into contempt or disrepute.” (The first such decision, in 1999, was overturned on appeal.)

A strong argument can be made that this provision of the Lanham Act itself clearly violates the First Amendment. As UCLA professor and Washington Post blogger Eugene Volokh has just argued, trademark registration “should be seen as a form of ‘limited public forum,’ in which the government may impose content-based limits but not viewpoint-based ones. An exclusion of marks that disparage groups while allowing marks that praise those groups strikes me as viewpoint discrimination.”

Courts, however, have yet to adopt this interpretation, making it unclear what implications, if any, the Redskins decision will have on several universities. Stanford abandoned its “Indians” symbol in 1972, but Florida State still maintains its “Seminoles” trademark as does the University of Utah on “Utes,” “Runnin Utes,” “Lady Utes,” as well as the “Circle and Feather” around the letter U. In addition, let us not fail to notice Notre Dame, which has registered trademarks for “Irish,” ”Fighting Irish,” and “Fightin Irish.” Surely there must be some Hibernians somewhere who regard the combative little leprechaun that is one of the protected images as “disparaging.”