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During colonial times, English speech regulations were rather restrictive.The English criminal common law of seditious libel made criticizing the government a crime. Lord Chief Justice John Holt, writing in 1704–1705, explained the rationale for the prohibition: "For it is very necessary for all governments that the people should have a good opinion of it."
First Amendment freedoms are most in danger when the government seeks to control thought or to justify its laws for that impermissible end. The right to think is the beginning of freedom, and speech must be protected from the government because speech is the beginning of thought. [290] In United States v.
The whole purpose of the First Amendment is to keep the government out of the business of evaluating the content of speech. The strength of an idea is its acceptance in the public marketplace of ...
The government encouraging them to remove false speech only violates the 1st Amendment if it can be proved that the government caused, and will cause in the future, speech to be blocked.
[a] The Court began by explaining that criticizing government and public officials was at the core of the American constitutional rights to freedom of speech and freedom of the press. [13] The general proposition that freedom of expression upon public questions is secured by the First Amendment has long been settled by our decisions.
Both cases pose the question of when speech by government officials violates the First Amendment. The leading Supreme Court precedent, Bantam Books v. Sullivan, was decided in 1963.
"It was not by accident or coincidence that the rights to freedom in speech and press were coupled in a single guaranty with the rights of the people peaceably to assemble and to petition for redress of grievances." Thomas, 323 U. S., at 530. Both speech and petition are integral to the democratic process, although not necessarily in the same way.
First Amendment jurisprudence is the longest sustained meditation on how to have free speech in a free society, and it has generally done a pretty good job of carving out reasonable exceptions to ...