The Right and the Duty: Jefferson, Sedition and the Birth of the First Amendment's Central Meaning (original) (raw)

Free Speech in Wartime: Sedition Acts during the Presidencies of John Adams and Woodrow Wilson

Free Speech in Wartime: Sedition Acts during the Presidencies of John Adams and Woodrow Wilson, 2017

This paper analyzes two time eras in which the United States federal government created and passed two sedition acts: in 1798 with President John Adams and in 1918 with President Woodrow Wilson. Both ultimately affected American’s freedom of speech during wartime, as well as during times of peace. This analysis addresses the specific acts themselves, the overall political atmosphere in each time period, including who were considered the country’s “enemies,” in-depth consideration of one court case per era, the government and public reaction to the acts, and the overall impact that both eras had on the development of American Constitutionalism. There will be similarities and differences within each era, but the long-term effects of these wartime sedition acts on American Constitutionalism are ultimately the most significant contribution to this thesis.

The Internal Security Acts of 1798: The Founding Generation and the Judiciary during America's First National Security Crisis

Journal of Supreme Court History, 2009

It is a truism that a nation must protect itself from internal enemies as well as foreign threats of aggression and invasion. But that is not the entire matter. Our American democracy has striven, with mixed success, to be careful that the justified ends of the American experiment-freedom, justice, and the rule of law-are not sacrificed on the altar of the means to protect these ends. On the eve of the Civil War, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Nelson wrote in Durand v. Hollins that the "great object and duty of Government is the protection of the lives, liberty, and property of the people composing it, whether abroad or at home; and any Government failing in the accomplishment of the object, or the performance of the duty, is not worth preserving." 1 Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1810, after leaving the Presidency, that "[t]o lose our country by a scrupulous adherence to written law, would be to lose the law itself. .. thus absurdly sacrificing the end to the means." 2 Abraham Lincoln, in total agreement, rhetorically asked in 1861, "[A]re all the laws, but one, to go unexecuted, and the government itself go to pieces, lest that

Constitutionalism, Conflict, and Consent: Jefferson on the Impeachment Power

A problem within liberal constitutionalism is determining whether the majority actually consents to its government, and, in particular, to those extraordinary acts that take place in the silence of the law. This paper explores this problem in the U.S. context by presenting Thomas Jefferson'sunderstanding of the impeachment power. Jeffersonpreferred a theory of impeachment that, like his theory of coordinate review, would allow each department to participate in the impeachment process, because he believed that executive participation would improve the law bringing its own character, or will, to it.As an alternative to the more common political understanding of impeachment, which leans toward legislative exclusivity, and the dominant legal understanding, which tends toward judicial finality, Jefferson's theory offers a way for the people to judge whether a particular act of lawlessness is in thepublic good.