The First Amendment is only 45 words long. But more than 200 years and thousands of court decisions later, we’re still arguing over a basic question: what do those words mean — and what did they mean to the early Americans who adopted them?
To look through history and debate what originalism can — and can’t — tell us about the First Amendment’s free speech clause, we are joined by:
Jud Campbell, Stanford Law School professor and the author of Natural Rights and the First Amendment and Determining Rights
Stephen Solomon, Marjorie Deane Professor of Journalism at New York University, the founding editor of First Amendment Watch, and the author of Revolutionary Dissent: How the Founding Generation Created the Freedom of Speech
Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
02:20 Original meaning and modern First Amendment doctrine
09:12 Would the founders recognize our today’s First Amendment?
16:00 The Alien and Sedition Acts
20:21 How the founding generation practiced free speech
24:35 Can we define “originalism”?
32:05 Representative government and the promise of liberty
45:00 The First Amendment’s absolute language
51:36 New York Times v. Sullivan
58:01 Amending the First Amendment
01:04:30 Outro
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