4: FREEDOM OF SPEECH

    1. Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong, The Brethren: Inside the Supreme Court (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005), 239–40. The law clerk in whom Justice Stewart confided was Larry Tribe.

    2. See, e.g., Frederick Schauer, “Fear, Risk, and the First Amendment: Unraveling the Chilling Effect,” Boston University Law Review 58 (1978): 685.

    3. See, e.g., Editorial, “Sordid, but Protected,” Los Angeles Times, April 21, 2010; Adam Liptak, “A Significant Term, with Bigger Cases Ahead,” New York Times, June 29, 2011; Greg Stohr, “Freedom of Speech Is Buttressed as U.S. Supreme Court Concludes Term,” Bloomberg, June 28, 2011, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-06-28/speech-rights-triumph-as-u-s-high-court-limits-government-power.html.

    4. Adam Liptak, “Study Challenges Supreme Court’s Image as Defender of Free Speech,” New York Times, January 8, 2012.

    5. For some of the leading works on First Amendment theory, see Jeremy Waldron, The Harm in Hate Speech (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012); Seana Valentine Shiffrin, “A Thinker-Based Approach to Freedom of Speech,” Constitutional Commentary 27 (2011): 283; Geoffrey Stone, Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004); Robert C. Post, Constitutional Domains: Democracy, Community, Management (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995); Cass R. Sunstein, Democracy and the Problem of Free Speech (New York: Free Press, 1995); C. Edwin Baker, Human Liberty and Freedom of Speech (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Steven H. Shiffrin, The First Amendment, Democracy, and Romance (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990); Frederick Schauer, Free Speech: A Philosophical Enquiry (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Robert Bork, “Neutral Principles and Some First Amendment Problems,” Indiana Law Journal 47 (1971): 1; Thomas I. Emerson, “Toward a General Theory of the First Amendment,” Yale Law Journal 72 (1963): 877; and Alexander Meiklejohn, “The First Amendment Is an Absolute,” Supreme Court Review 245 (1961).

    6. Frederick Schauer, “The Exceptional First Amendment” in American Exceptionalism and Human Rights, ed. Michael Ignatieff (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2009).

    7. David Strauss, The Living Constitution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).

    8. On Black’s free speech jurisprudence, see, e.g., Harry Kalven Jr., “Upon Rereading Mr. Justice Black on the First Amendment,” UCLA Law Review 14 (1966): 428.

    9. For a contrary view of originalism generally, see Antonin Scalia, ed., A Matter of Interpretation: Federal Courts and the Law (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997); and Steven G. Calabresi, ed., Originalism: A Quarter-Century of Debate (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, 2007).

  10. Some suggest that this was true only of restraints on the press, not ordinary oral expression. See, e.g., Akhil Reed Amar, The Bill of Rights: Creation and Reconstruction (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). For a general history of this period, see Leonard W. Levy, Emergence of a Free Press (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2004)(reprinting 1985 Oxford University Press edition, which in turn was a version of the 1960 Oxford edition of Legacy of Suppression: Freedom of Speech and Press in Early American History).

  11. Ronald K. L. Collins and Sam Chaltain, We Must Not Be Afraid to Be Free: Stories of Free Expression in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); and Michael Kent Curtis, Free Speech, “the People’s Darling Privilege”: Struggles for Freedom of Expression in American History (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000).

  12. James Morton Smith, Freedom’s Fetters: The Alien and Sedition Laws and American Civil Liberties (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1956); and David Jenkins, “The Sedition Act of 1798 and the Incorporation of Seditious Libel into First Amendment Jurisprudence,” American Journal of Legal History 45 (2001): 154.

  13. William Lee Miller, Arguing About Slavery: John Quincy Adams and the Great Battle in the United States Congress (New York: Vintage Books, 1998); and Clement Eaton, “Censorship of the Southern Mails,” American Historical Review 48 (1943): 266.

  14. See Michael Kent Curtis, “Lincoln, Vallandigham, and Anti-War Speech in the Civil War,” William and Mary Bill of Rights Journal 7 (1998): 105; and Geoffrey Stone, Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime from the Sedition Act of 1798 to the War on Terrorism (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), 79–134.

  15. Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Rereading Sex: Battles over Sexual Knowledge and Suppression in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Knopf, 2002); David M. Rabban, Free Speech in Its Forgotten Years (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997); and Margaret A. Blanchard, Revolutionary Sparks: Freedom of Expression in Modern America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).

  16. Paul L. Murphy, The Meaning of Freedom of Speech: First Amendment Freedoms from Wilson to FDR (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1972).

  17. Paul L. Murphy, World War I and the Origin of Civil Liberties in the United States (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979).

  18. Mark A. Graber, Transforming Free Speech: The Ambiguous Legacy of Civil Libertarianism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 75–121.

  19. Thomas Healy, The Great Dissent: How Oliver Wendell Holmes Changed His Mind—and Changed the History of Free Speech in America (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2013).

  20. Abrams v. United States, 250 U.S. 616 (1919) (Holmes, J., dissenting).

  21. Whitney v. California, 274 U.S. 357, 375 (1927) (Brandeis, J., concurring).

  22. W. Va. State Bd. of Educ. v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624, 642 (1943).

  23. Stone, Perilous Times, 311–426; and Stephen J. Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).

  24. Dennis v. United States, 341 U.S. 494 (1951).

  25. See, e.g., Collins and Chaltain, We Must Not Be Afraid to Be Free, 59–87, 134–71, 211–12, 269–91.

  26. Whitney, 274 U.S. at 377 (Brandeis, J., concurring).

  27. Cohen v. California, 430 U.S. 15 (1971).

  28. Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, 130 S. Ct. 1577 (2010).

  29. Korematsu v. United States, 323 U.S. 214 (1944).

  30. Peter Irons, Justice at War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).

  31. See, e.g., David Cole, “The First Amendment’s Borders: The Place of Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project in First Amendment Doctrine,” Harvard Law and Policy Review 6 (2012): 147; Erwin Chemerinsky, “Free Speech and the ‘War on Terror,’” Trial (2011); Timothy Zick, “The First Amendment in Trans-Border Perspective: Toward a More Cosmopolitan Orientation,” Boston College Law Review 52 (2011): 941.

  32. Atul Gawande, “Hellhole,” New Yorker, March 30, 2009.

  33. Matt Stroud, “Why Are Prisoners Committing Suicide in Pennsylvania?,” Nation, April 18, 2012.

  34. Beard v. Banks, 548 U.S. 521 (2006).

  35. Editorial, “The Youngest, Cruelest Justice,” New York Times, February 27, 1992.

  36. See Overton v. Bazzetta, 539 U. S. 126, 138 (2003) (Thomas, J., concurring).

  37. See Turner v. Safley, 482 U.S. 78 (1987).

  38. See Pickering v. Board of Ed. of Township High School Dist. 205, Will Cty., 391 U. S. 563 (1968).

  39. McAuliffe v. City of New Bedford, 155 Mass. 216, 220 (1892).

  40. Garcetti v. Ceballos, 547 U.S. 410, 426 (2006).

  41. See, e.g., Helen Norton, “Constraining Public Employee Speech: Government’s Control of Its Workers’ Speech to Protect Its Own Expression,” Duke Law Journal 59 (2009): 1; Sheldon H. Nahmod, “Public Employee Speech, Categorical Balancing and Section 1983: A Critique of Garcetti v. Ceballos,” University of Richmond Law Review (2008): 561; and Cynthia Estlund, “Harmonizing Work and Citizenship: A Due Process Solution to a First Amendment Problem,” Supreme Court Review (2006): 115.

  42. Morse v. Frederick, 551 U.S. 393, 397 (2007).

  43. See, e.g., Brief Amicus Curiae of the Christian Legal Society in Support of Respondent, Morse v. Frederick, 551 U.S. 393 (2007) (No. 06-278).

  44. J.D.B. v. North Carolina, 131 S. Ct. 2394, 2399 (2011).

  45. Miller v. Alabama, 132 S. Ct. 2455, 2470 (2012).

  46. Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association, 131 S. Ct. 2729, 2742 (2011).

  47. Editorial, “Joysticks and the First Amendment,” Washington Post, October 31, 2010.

  48. Antonin Scalia, “Originalism: The Lesser Evil,” University of Cincinnati Law Review 57 (1989): 849, 864.

  49. Jennifer Senior, “In Conversation: Antonin Scalia,” New York, October 6, 2013, http://nymag.com/news/features/antonin-scalia-2013-10; and Nina Totenberg, “Justice Scalia, the Great Dissenter, Opens Up,” NPR, April 28, 2008, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89986017.

  50. Adam J. White, “The Burkean Justice,” Weekly Standard, July 18, 2011.

  51. “U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito Says Pragmatism, Stability Should Guide Court,” press release, Columbia Law School, April 24, 2012.

  52. On the pros and cons of rules versus standards generally, see Kathleen Sullivan, “The Justices of Rules and Standards,” Harvard Law Review 106 (1992): 22; and Peter Schlag, “Rules and Standards,” UCLA Law Review 33 (1985): 379.

  53. United States v. Stevens, 130 S. Ct. 1577 (2010).

  54. Frederick Schauer, “Harm(s) and the First Amendment,” Supreme Court Review (2012): 81, 87.

  55. Brief for the United States at 8, United States v. Stevens, 130 S. Ct. 1577 (2010) (No. 08-769).

  56. See New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 710 (1964).

  57. McGrath v. Kristensen, 340 U.S. 162, 178 (1950) (Jackson, J., concurring) (quoting Baron Bramwell) (internal quotation marks omitted).

  58. U.S. v. Alvarez, 638 F.3d 666, 673 (9th Cir. 2011) (Kozinski, C.J., concurring in the denial of rehearing en banc).

  59. United States v. Alvarez, 132 S. Ct. 2537, 2542 (2012).

  60. Leading jurists abroad have called this approach a “proportionality” analysis. See Aharon Barak, Proportionality: Constitutional Rights and Their Limitations (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

  61. See Harvard Law School, “Celebrating Justice Stephen Breyer at HLS,” YouTube, published on October 4, 2013, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJKs5OMvqhg (segment beginning at 1:10:29).

  62. Snyder v. Phelps, 131 S. Ct. 1207 (2011).

  63. But see Steven J. Heyman, “To Drink the Cup of Fury: Funeral Picketing, Public Discourse, and the First Amendment,” Connecticut Law Review 45 (2012): 101.

  64. Editorial, “The Right to Even Ugly Free Speech,” Washington Post, March 2, 2011.

  65. See Erwin Chemerinsky, “Not a Free Speech Court,” Arizona Law Review 53 (2011): 723. For a diverse set of views on the Roberts Court’s free speech cases, see “What Are We Saying?: Violence, Vulgarity, Lies … and the Importance of 21st Century Free Speech,” Albany Law Review 76 (2013): 409.