Front cover image for Reflections on freedom of speech and the First Amendment

Reflections on freedom of speech and the First Amendment

Annotation The guarantee of free speech enshrined in the U.S. Bill of Rights draws upon two millennia of Western thought about the value and necessity of free inquiry. Acclaimed legal scholar George Anastaplo traces the philosophical development of the idea of free inquiry from Plato's Apology to Socrates to John Milton's Areopagitica. He describes how these seminal texts and others by such diverse thinkers as St. Paul, Thomas More, and John Stuart Mill influenced the formation and the earliest applications of the First Amendment. Anastaplo also focuses on the critical free speech implications of a dozen Supreme Court cases and shows how First Amendment interpretations have evolved in response to modern events. Reflections on Freedom of Speech and the First Amendment grounds its vision of America's most basic freedoms in the intellectual traditions of Western political philosophy, providing crucial insight into the legal challenges of the future through the lens of the past
Print Book, English, ©2007
University Press of Kentucky, Lexington, Ky., ©2007
History
xviii, 320 pages ; 24 cm
9780813191737, 9780813124247, 0813191734, 0813124247
74353885
Plato's Apology of Socrates
The ministry of St. Paul
Thomas More and parliamentary immunity (1521)
John Milton's Areopagitica (1644)
William Blackstone, Patrick Henry, and Edmund Burke on liberty (1765-1790)
The Declaration of Independence (1776), the Northwest Ordinance (1787)
Constitutionalism and the workings of freedom of speech
The Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom (1785)
The emergence of a national bill of rights (1789-1791)
The organization of the First Amendment
The Sedition Act of 1798
John Stuart Mill's On Liberty (1859)
Freedom of speech and the coming of the Civil War
The naive folly of realists : a defense of Justice Black (1937-1971)
Schenck v. United States (1919), Abrams v. United States (1919)
Debs v. United States (1919), Gitlow v. New York (1925)
Winston S. Churchill and the cause of freedom
Dennis v. United States (1951), the Rosenberg Case (1950-1953)
Cohen v. California (1971), Texas v. Johnson (1989)
The Pentagon Papers Case (1971)
Obscenity and the law
Private property and public freedom
Buckley v. Valeo (1976)
The regulation of commercial speech
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948)
The future of the First Amendment?