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Freedom of Speech: A Reference Guide to the United States by Keith Werhan

By Keith Werhan

Even if freedom of speech is considered a bedrock precept of yank constitutionalism, the preferrred courtroom didn't realize it as a basic correct important of robust constitutional safeguard till the center of the 20 th century. This paintings specializes in the center doctrines that represent loose speech jurisprudence. It presents a historic evolution of the doctrine and examines the foremost perfect courtroom judgements affecting it.This quantity offers readers an analytical framework for figuring out unfastened speech jurisprudence. It takes a clean method of unfastened speech method via breaking it into obtainable elements: substantial doctrines and procedural doctrines. This paintings contains informative heritage chapters at the background and thought of loose expression. It additionally appears on the preferrred Court's fight with subversive advocacy and its value in preserving loose speech.

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Extra info for Freedom of Speech: A Reference Guide to the United States Constitution (Reference Guides to the United States Constitution)

Example text

James Madison, writing in 1799, concluded more broadly that it was nonsensical to limit the First Amendment protection of freedom of speech to a freedom from prior restraints. ”30 Although the Federalists prevailed in Congress, their victory should not canonize their traditionalist conception of free expression as the “framers’ intent” of the speech clause. The debate in Congress was deeply partisan, and it proceeded almost exclusively along party lines. Federalists and Republicans advanced constitutional arguments for tactical gain.

Senators may have intended that the constitutional protection of free expression be liberated from the familiar constraints of the common law. But it is also possible that senators omitted the qualifying phrase as surplusage. They may have assumed, in other words, that readers naturally would ascribe to “freedom of speech” its common law meaning. A definitive answer on the original meaning of the speech clause of the First Amendment is not possible because there is virtually no recorded debate of the drafting and ratification of that provision.

For example, the Act prohibited seditious libel of the Federalist president and Congress, but not of the Republican vice president, Thomas Jefferson. In addition, the Act contained a sunset provision that extinguished its provisions on March 3, 1801, which just happened to be the final day of President Adams’s term of office. Congress passed the Sedition Act of 1798 not because the Federalist reading of the First Amendment was correct, but because the Federalists controlled Congress. Having fought so hard to secure passage of the Sedition Act, the Federalists were hardly hesitant to enforce its previsions.

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