The Egalitarian First Amendment: Its History and a Critique on the Grounds of Text, Rights, Negative Liberty, and Our Republican Constitutional Structure
affiliation not provided to SSRN
April 23, 2009
North Carolina Central Law Review, Vol. 31, p. 153, 2009
This article articulates the growing tendency of constitutional theorists and U.S. Supreme Court justices to construe the First Amendment in the light of egalitarian principles and argues that to do so is inconsistent with the meaning and purpose of the First Amendment. The article criticizes the egalitarian approach as creating a positive right, contrary to the structure of the Bill of Rights as a “charter of negative liberties,” and as diluting the right to speech by infusing in it a relative determination of speech values. Finally, the article concludes that the egalitarian reading should be rejected as endangering the very liberties the First Amendment creates.
Number of Pages in PDF File: 32
Keywords: First Amendment, interpretation, negative, negative liberty, charter, Bill of Rights, egalitarian, positive, positive liberty, history, text, right, Stephen Breyer, Active Liberty, Cass Sunstein, democracy promotion, Buckley, Abrams, Debs, antitrust, monopoly, marketplace, originalism
JEL Classification: K19, K39Accepted Paper Series
Date posted: April 24, 2009 ; Last revised: September 17, 2009
© 2015 Social Science Electronic Publishing, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
This page was processed by apollo6 in 0.297 seconds