Free Speech in the Twenty-First Century: Ten Lessons from the Twentieth Century

Abstract

At the turn of the twentieth century, we knew almost nothing about the First Amendment. Although there had been important disputes about free speech over the Sedition Act of 1798, the suppression of abolitionist literature in the early nineteenth century and during the Civil War, and although both state and federal courts had occasionally wrestled during the nineteenth century with such diverse free speech issues as obscenity and lotteries, for the most part, there was no settled understanding about the meaning of the First Amendment. 

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, however, we have an astonishingly rich, multi-faceted, and often maddeningly complex free speech jurisprudence. In this Essay, I will try to identify the ten judgments that the Supreme Court made during the course of the twentieth century that most fundamentally shaped the overall framework of contemporary First Amendment doctrine.