Voltarine de Cleyre Quotes
Make no laws whatsoever concerning speech, and speech will be free; so soon as you make a declaration on paper that speech will be free, you will have a hundred lawyers proving that "freedom does not mean abuse, nor liberty license;" and they will define and define freedom out of existence.
Voltarine de Cleyre, 1866-1912, Poet and essayist, Quoted in Sinclair, The Cry for Justice
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
Striking down a law making cross burning a crime:
Twenty year prison sentences were imposed for publishing left wing Bolshevik literature. The case was appealed to the Supreme Court:
Nixon’s views of free speech rights did not recognize the right of those who advocate revolution or government or system change in America. By his standard all of the Founding Fathers should not have been entitled to most of their early speeches. The Supreme Court repeatedly rejected his standard, distinguishing between speech to change or reform the government and illegal action to bring those changes about.
In WWI Congress had passed a law that prohibited anyone from undermining or interfering with the war effort. The defendants had passed out anti-war literature to young men heading for military service. The court then overlooked the First Amendment and came up with a strange logic where the “clear and present danger” was the test of whether the First Amendment would apply. The anti war pamphleteers went to jail. Today, we look back on this and find it very surprising but this is yet another example of erosion of freedom and civil liberties when the nation is at war. By the 1950s, the Supreme Court had reversed itself and the First Amendment was restored to its original intent.
