Law Commons^™

Free Speech In The United States And Canada, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

This comparison of freedom of speech in the United States and Canada concentrates on Supreme Court decisions in the two countries and on kinds of speech mainly engaged in by extreme dissenters and political outsiders. After brief comments about constitutional language and general approaches, I discuss subversive speech and other speech that encourages criminal acts, hate speech, symbolic speech, and public demonstrations.

In both countries, a major premise of modern adjudication is that freedom of expression is a central feature of liberal democracy. Government "by the people," even in the extended sense of government by representatives, requires that citizens openly …

Six Conservatives In Search Of The First Amendment: The Revealing Case Of Nude Dancing, Vincent A. Blasi

Faculty Scholarship

The future of political freedom in the United States hardly turns on whether women have a First Amendment right to dance in the nude in bars and peep shows. The future of artistic freedom is perhaps implicated by this question, but only if the law's demand for general principle prohibits judges from treating expressive nudity in those environments as fundamentally different from expressive nudity in ballet performances, museum exhibitions, and films. Barnes v. Glen Theatre, Inc. is an interesting and potentially important case not because of the significance of the specific issue it decided, but because it provoked a lively …

The End Of New York Times V Sullivan: Reflections On Masson V New Yorker Magazine, Lee C. Bollinger

Faculty Scholarship

Virtually every year since New York Times v Sullivan, the Supreme Court has decided at least one or two First Amendment cases involving the press. This now seemingly permanent, annual pageant of media cases undoubtedly has significance for the development of both constitutional law and the character of American journalism, though oddly that significance has been little explored in the scholarly literature. This past year the Court had two cases, both of which received an unusual amount of discussion within the press. It is, of course, understandable, even if not wholly defensible, for the press to give disproportionate coverage …

Rouge Et Noir Reread: A Popular Constitutional History Of The Angelo Herndon Case, Kendall Thomas

Faculty Scholarship

In 1932, Eugene Angelo Braxton Hemdon, a young Afro-American member of the Communist Party, U.S.A., was arrested in Atlanta and charged with an attempt to incite insurrection against that state's lawful authority. Some five years later, in Herndon v. Lowry, Herndon filed a writ of habeas corpus asking the U.S. Supreme Court to consider the constitutionality of the Georgia statute under which he had been convicted. Two weeks before his twenty-fourth birthday, the Court, voting 5-4, declared the use of the Georgia political-crimes statute against him unconstitutional on the grounds that it deprived Herndon of his rights to freedom …

Foreword, Lee C. Bollinger

Faculty Scholarship

The mass media are too important to American democracy, too capable of causing injury, and too easy a target for the perennial wish to find a scapegoat for the country's ills ever to be very far from the center of public attention and debate. That is certainly true today. And, though every generation probably thinks that it stands at a crossroads on the question what to do with the media, I would nevertheless venture to say that the issues of our time are more serious, and more complex, than ever before. One can safely predict, in any event, that we …

A Constitutional Right Of Religious Exemption: An Historical Perspective, Philip A. Hamburger

Faculty Scholarship

Did late eighteenth-century Americans understand the Free Exercise Clause of the United States Constitution to provide individuals a right of exemption from civil laws to which they had religious objections? Claims of exemption based on the Free Exercise Clause have prompted some of the Supreme Court's most prominent free exercise decisions, and therefore this historical inquiry about a right of exemption may have implications for our constitutional jurisprudence. Even if the Court does not adopt late eighteenth-century ideas about the free exercise of religion, we may, nonetheless, find that the history of such ideas can contribute to our contemporary analysis. …