GOVT249 - The "Invention" of Free Speech

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Academic Year 2005/2006

The "Invention" of Free Speech
GOVT 249 FA

We tend to think of freedom of speech as a central element of the American creed, an idea as old as the nation itself. But while the notion of protecting speech appears in unusually direct language of the first amendment ("Congress shall make no law..."), which was ratified in 1791, it wasn't until the early and middle decades of the twentieth century that Supreme Course addressed what freedom of speech meant in real terms. That era, defined roughly by cases emerging from the First World War and the landmark rulings of the Warren Court in the 1960s, is the focus of this course, a period of enormous intellectual vitality in which some of the nation's greatest legal figures - Oliver Wendell Holmes, Learned Hand, Felix Frankfurter, Louis Brandeis, Hugo Black, William Brennan and Benjamin Cardozo - engaged in a crucial dialogue over the interplay competing values: between speech and equality, speech and privacy, speech and security, speech and community. Their work, both speculative and experimental, had the trial-and-error quality of the laboratory at a time which so much of modern life was being "invented": not only the integration of new machines like the automobile and the radio and the motion picture camera into the lives of ordinary people, but new conceptions of the relationship between government and citizen which led to the modern liberal states. We are living with the results of that "age of invention" which, for our purposes in the class, includes a society that values speech perhaps more than any in human history.

MAJOR READINGS

Menand, Louis, THE METAPHYSICAL CLUB
Fiss, Owen, THE IRONY OF FREE SPEECH
Amar, Akhil, THE BILL OF RIGHTS
Levy, Leonard, THE ORIGIN OF THE BILL OF RIGHTS
Amar, Akhil, Hugo Black and the Hall of Fame, Alabama Law Review
Brennan, William J., Supreme Court and Meiklejohn Interpretation of First Amendment, Harvard Law Review
Stone, Geoffrey, PERILOUS TIMES
Simon, James, F., THE ANTAGONISTS: HUGO BLACK, FELIX FRANKFURTER AND CIVIL LIBERTIES IN MODERN AMERICA
Lewis, Anthony, MAKE NO LAW: THE SULLIVAN CASE AND THE FIRST AMENDMENT
Kalven, Harry, A WORTHY TRADITION: FREE SPEECH IN AMERICA

EXAMINATIONS AND ASSIGNMENTS

Students will be required to produce two papers and take a final essay exam.

ADDITIONAL REQUIREMENTS and/or COMMENTS

Class time will be supplemented by guest speakers, including historians, first amendment scholars, and attorneys who have argued first amendment cases. A field trip to a federal court is also planned.

COURSE FORMAT: Seminar

REGISTRATION INFORMATION

Level: UGRD Credit: 1 Gen Ed Area Dept: SBS GOVT Grading Mode: Graded

Prerequisites: NONE

SECTION 01

Instructor(s): Brewster,Todd A.

Times: ..T.... 01:10PM-04:00PM; Location: FISK116;

Reserved Seats: (Total Limit: 25)

SR. major: 5 Jr. major: 10

SR. non-major: 3 Jr. non-major: 4 SO: 3 FR: X

Special Attributes:

Curricular Renewal: Ethical Reasoning, Writing

Links to Web Resources For This Course.

Last Updated on MAR-30-2006