"Free Speech, "The People's Darling Privilege

Struggles for Freedom of Expression in American History

Bibliographic Data

ID10035797
AuthorsMichael P Zuckert (University of Notre Dame, corresponding author), Michael Kent Curtis
Year2002
Volume88
Issue4
Pages1533
Publication date2002-03-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of American History (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0021-8723 • E-ISSN: 1945-2314
PublisherOxford University Press (OUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/2700660
OpenAlexW2206751790
LanguageEN
Citations received9

This very fine book is a successor to the author's No State Shall Abridge (1990), a book that establishes as authoritatively as can be done the thesis that the privileges and immunities clause of the Fourteenth Amendment was intended to “incorporate” the Bill of Rights. Free Speech succeeds the earlier book in two important ways. First, the incorporation thesis has always met with great resistance for the reason, among others, that the Fourteenth Amendment appeared to have an exclusively racial agenda, without a clear connection to the Bill of Rights. Michael Kent Curtis shows here that free speech issues loomed very large in the antebellum period, and that the Republicans who controlled Congress when the Fourteenth Amendment was written had many speech-related grievances on their mind. Both in the North and in the South there had been serious efforts to suppress antislavery speech, including suppression of Republican party speech in the South. Those efforts at suppression had sparked countermovements to defend speech, promoting the growth of a “free-speech tradition.” Most of this tradition grew up outside the courts, for there was exceedingly little free speech constitutional law, and what there was frequently supported the suppressors. This was as true at the time of the Sedition Act as it was in the 1850s and during the war in the 1860s. After Curtis's book, nobody should be able to say that the Bill of Rights was unlikely to be on the minds of the drafters of the Fourteenth Amendment

Bill of rights · Constitution · Free speech · nobody · Political science · Politics · Sedition · American Constitutional Law and Politics · History · Law

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