First Amendment Watch

"There is nothing so fretting and vexatious, nothing so justly terrible to tyrants, and their tools and abettors, as a free press."

--Samuel Adams writing as "Populus" in the Boston Gazette, 14 March 1768

"To the press alone, chequered as it is with abuses, the world is indebted for all the triumphs which have been gained by reason and humanity over error and oppression."

--James Madison, Report on the Virginia Resolutions, 1800

". . . a profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open, and that it may well include vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials."

--Justice William Brennan, New York Times v. Sullivan, 1964

"Whoever would overthrow the liberty of the nation, must begin by subduing the freedom of speech."

--Cato, Essay 15, 4 February 1720; New-York Weekly Journal, 18 February 1733

"Those who won our independence believed that . . . freedom to think as you will and to speak as you think are means indispensible to the discovery and spread of political truth."

--Justice Louis Brandeis, concurring, Whitney v. California (1927)

"[The] right of freely examining public characters and measures, and of free communication among the people thereon, which has ever been justly deemed the only effectual guardian of every other right."

--James Madison, Report on the Virginia Resolutions, 1800

"If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion."

--Justice Robert Jackson, Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette (1943)

"[T]he fitting remedy for evil counsels is good ones. Believing in the power of reason as applied through public discussion, they [the Founders] eschewed silence coerced by law—the argument of force in its worst form."

--Justice Louis Brandeis, concurring, Whitney v. California (1927)

"I think we should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe and believe to be fraught with death, unless they so imminently threaten immediate interference with the lawful and pressing purposes of the law that an immediate check is required to save the country."

--Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, dissenting, Abrams v. United States (1919)

Subpoenas

Reporter’s Privilege: Shaky Protection for Confidentiality of Sources

Reporter’s privilege is the right asserted by journalists to keep their sources confidential in the face of a court order to reveal the information. The U.S. Supreme Court considered that issue only once, in 1972, in the case of Branzburg v. Hayes, 408 U.S. 665. The Court in a 5-4 decision said that reporters did not enjoy a First Amendment[Read More…]

August 29, 2017 — Legal Cases, News Gathering, Subpoenas

States Move to Protect Journalist Sources

Journalists have recently gotten a boost to use reporter’s privilege to keep news sources confidential.

April 19, 2017 — Below the Fold, News Gathering, Subpoenas

First Amendment Watch

Subpoenas

Reporter’s Privilege: Shaky Protection for Confidentiality of Sources

States Move to Protect Journalist Sources

“Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”

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