First Amendment Commons^™

The First Amendment’S Borders: The Place Of Holder V. Humanitarian Law Project In First Amendment Doctrine, David Cole

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, the Supreme Court’s first decision pitting First Amendment rights against national security interests since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the Court appears to have radically departed from some of the First Amendment’s most basic principles, including the maxims that speech may not be penalized because of its viewpoint, that even speech advocating crime deserves protection until it constitutes incitement, and that political association is constitutionally protected absent specific intent to further a group’s illegal ends. These principles lie at the core of our political and democratic freedoms, yet Humanitarian Law Project …

The Value Of Dissent, Lawrence B. Solum

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This essay reviews Dissent, Injustice, and the Meanings of America by Steven H. Shiffrin (1999).

Theorizing about the freedom of speech has been a central enterprise of contemporary legal scholarship. The important contributions to the debate are simply far too numerous to categorize. One ambition of this theorizing is the production of a comprehensive theory of the freedom of expression, a set of consistent normative principles that would explain and justify First Amendment doctrine. Despite an outpouring of scholarly effort, the consensus is that free speech theory has failed to realize this imperial ambition. Rather than searching for the global …