Contemporary civil libertarians claim that their works preserve a worthy American tradition of defending free-speech rights dating back to the framing of the First Amendment. Transforming Free Speech challenges the worthiness, and indeed the very existence of one uninterrupted libertarian tradition. Mark A. Graber asserts that in the past, broader political visions inspired libertarian interpretations of the First Amendment. In reexamining the philosophical and jurisprudential foundations of the defense of expression rights from the Civil War to the present, he exposes the monolithic free-speech tradition as a myth. Instead of one conception of the system of free expression, two emerge: the conservative libertarian tradition that dominated discourse from the Civil War until World War I, and the civil libertarian tradition that dominates later twentieth-century argument. The essence of the current perception of the American free-speech tradition derives from the writings of Zechariah Chafee, Jr. (1885-1957), the progressive jurist most responsible for the modern interpretation of the First Amendment. His interpretation, however, deliberately obscured earlier libertarian arguments linking liberty of speech with liberty of property. Moreover, Chafee stunted the development of a more radical interpretation of expression rights that would give citizens the resources and independence necessary for the effective exercise of free speech. Instead, Chafee maintained that the right to political and social commentary could be protected independent of material inequalities that might restrict access to the marketplace of ideas. His influence enfeebled expression rights in a world where their exercise depends increasingly on economic power. Untangling the libertarian legacy, Graber points out the disjunction in the libertarian tradition to show that free-speech rights, having once been transformed, can be transformed again. Well-conceived and original in perspective, Transforming Free Speech will interest political theorists, students of government, and anyone interested in the origins of the free-speech tradition in the United States.
Written by a historian who became a full-time defender of civil liberties and has spent four decades advocating for the rights of victims of censorship, this book grew out of Finan’s desire to address the declining support for free speech ...
Although the meeting tabled the resolutions , Heywood increasingly became cut off from the Garrisonians . 34 Heywood's criticisms of Garrisonian abolitionists for refusing to uphold the free speech rights of antiwar Democrats prompted ...
... see, for example, William Edward Nelson, The Legalist Reformation: Law, Politics, and Ideology in New York, 1920–1980 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2001); Richard Primus, The American Language of Rights (New York, 1999); Edward Purcell, ...
This book focuses on regulatory challenges of creating and sustaining freedom of speech and freedom of information two decades after the fall of the Berlin wall, in global, comparative context.
In The Free Speech Century, two of America's leading First Amendment scholars, Lee C. Bollinger and Geoffrey R. Stone, have gathered a group of the nation's leading constitutional scholars--Cass Sunstein, Lawrence Lessig, Laurence Tribe, ...
In the book's first section, which includes the five essays written for Fish's celebrated debates with Dinesh D'Souza (the author and former Reagan White House policy analyst), Fish turns his attention to the neoconservative backlash.
. . Meiklejohn in his own way writes a prose as piercing as Holmes, and as a foremost American philosopher, the reach of his culture is as great . . . this is the most dangerous assault which the Holmes position has ever borne.
Drawing on a lifetime of writing about dictatorships and dissidents, Timothy Garton Ash argues that in this connected world that he calls cosmopolis, the way to combine freedom and diversity is to have more but also better free speech.
Hentoff's timely, fact-filled, and illuminating book describes the current assault on free speech from all points of the political spectrum--even from the traditionally liberal groups now intent on repressing opinions...
... 1988; see also Daniel S. Levy, “Behind the Anti-War Protests That Swept America in 1968,” Time, January 19, 2018 (“While a March 1967 poll had shown that more than half of Americans supported the way Johnson was handling the war, ...