Saturday, January 16, 2010

Stone on Free Speech in the Twentieth Century

Over at the University of Chicago Law Faculty Blog, the veteran student blogger David Schraub has a summary of the presentation to Chicago's Works in Progress seminar by Geoffrey R. Stone, the Edward H. Levi Distinguished Service Professor and the author of Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime from the Sedition Act of 1798 to the War on Terrorism (W.W. Norton, 2004). According to Mr. Schraub, in his presentation, entitled Free Speech in the Twenty-First Century: Ten Lessons from the Twentieth Century, Professor Stone argued:
At the start of the 20th century, there was virtually no free speech doctrine. The jurisprudence of the First Amendment developed through World War I, the red scares, McCarthyism, and Vietnam into what we have today: an imperfect, still developing, but cohesive model that remains the global standard (excepting a few high profile areas, like hate speech).
More.