Michael Kent Curtis

DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND MEDIA REALITIES: A PUZZLING FREE PRESS PARADOX

Freedom of speech, press, assembly, and petition have long been celebrated as crucial to democratic government. (I will often refer to these rights collectively as ‘freedom of expression’ or as ‘freedom of speech’.) United States Supreme Court decisions have, quite rightly, justified strong protection of these freedoms because of their crucial role in the functioning of American democracy. (Of course, there are other justifications as

Repressive Jurisprudence in the Early American Republic: The First Amendment and the Legacy of English Law

1. Political and jurisprudential worlds in conflict in the new Republic 2. Politics in the new Republic 3. Seditious and criminal libel in the colonies, the states, and the early Republic during the Washington administration 4. Federalist partisan use of seditious libel - statutory and common 5. Seditious and criminal libel during the Jefferson and Madison administrations 1800-16 6. Partisan prosecutions for seditious and criminal libel in the state courts: federalists against republicans, republicans against federalists, and republicans against dissident republicans in struggles for party control 7. Established jurisprudential doctrines (other than seditious and criminal libel) available in the new Republic for suppression of anti-establishment speech 8. Still other nineteenth-century doctrines for suppression of anti-establishment speech: the law of blasphemy and the slave-state anti-abolition statutes 9. Conclusion.