Professor Smolla has revised & greatly expanded the 1985 first edition of Professor Melville Nimmer's wonderfully crafted text on Free Speech. Professor Nimmer, now deceased, was a Professor of Law at UCLA from 1962 to 1985, & one of the country's foremost authorities on the First Amendment. Professor Smolla has been active in litigation on First Amendment issues & has written widely in the area. His book, Free Speech in an Open Society (1992) received the William O. Douglas Prize of the Speech Communication Association, the leading professional organization for college instructors in this field. This 1200-page text can serve as a core coursebook for a Free Speech or First Amendment course or as an exceptionally lucid supplemental book for the free speech component of a basic Constitutional Law course. It thoroughly covers all aspects of free speech, from theoretical doctrines to practical applications of those doctrines. Each of the following topics receives full-chapter treatment: Historical Background, Overview of Theory & Method, Overview of Modern Free Speech Doctrine, Incitement, Symbolic Speech, "Hate" Speech, Obscene & Pornographic Speech, Prior Restraints, Political Speech, Government-Related Speech, Tort Liability, Commercial & Proprietary Speech, selected aspects of Freedom of the Press, and Regulation of Electronic Mass Media.

9.1 A Pragmatic Cultural Framework for Legal Analysis -- 9.2 Concluding Remarks -- Bibliography -- Index

Despite its importance to the life of the nation and all its citizens, the Supreme Court remains a mystery to most Americans, its workings widely felt but rarely seen firsthand. In this book, journalists who cover the Court—acting as the eyes and ears of not just the American people, but the Constitution itself—give us a rare close look into its proceedings, the people behind them, and the complex, often fascinating ways in which justice is ultimately served. Their narratives form an intimate account of a year in the life of the Supreme Court. The cases heard by the Surpreme Court are, first and foremost, disputes involving real people with actual stories. The accidents and twists of circumstance that have brought these people to the last resort of litigation can make for compelling drama. The contributors to this volume bring these dramatic stories to life, using them as a backdrop for the larger issues of law and social policy that constitute the Court’s business: abortion, separation of church and state, freedom of speech, the right of privacy, crime, violence, discrimination, and the death penalty. In the course of these narratives, the authors describe the personalities and jurisprudential leanings of the various Justices, explaining how the interplay of these characters and theories about the Constitution interact to influence the Court’s decisions. Highly readable and richly informative, this book offers an unusually clear and comprehensive portrait of one of the most influential institutions in modern American life.

Contemporary civil libertarians claim that their works preserve a worthy American tradition of defending free-speech rights dating back to the framing of the First Amendment. Transforming Free Speech challenges the worthiness, and indeed the very existence of one uninterrupted libertarian tradition. Mark A. Graber asserts that in the past, broader political visions inspired libertarian interpretations of the First Amendment. In reexamining the philosophical and jurisprudential foundations of the defense of expression rights from the Civil War to the present, he exposes the monolithic free-speech tradition as a myth. Instead of one conception of the system of free expression, two emerge: the conservative libertarian tradition that dominated discourse from the Civil War until World War I, and the civil libertarian tradition that dominates later twentieth-century argument. The essence of the current perception of the American free-speech tradition derives from the writings of Zechariah Chafee, Jr. (1885-1957), the progressive jurist most responsible for the modern interpretation of the First Amendment. His interpretation, however, deliberately obscured earlier libertarian arguments linking liberty of speech with liberty of property. Moreover, Chafee stunted the development of a more radical interpretation of expression rights that would give citizens the resources and independence necessary for the effective exercise of free speech. Instead, Chafee maintained that the right to political and social commentary could be protected independent of material inequalities that might restrict access to the marketplace of ideas. His influence enfeebled expression rights in a world where their exercise depends increasingly on economic power. Untangling the libertarian legacy, Graber points out the disjunction in the libertarian tradition to show that free-speech rights, having once been transformed, can be transformed again. Well-conceived and original in perspective, Transforming Free Speech will interest political theorists, students of government, and anyone interested in the origins of the free-speech tradition in the United States.