Charles Brown
> My reading of U.S. First Amendment law history is that the freedom of speech was often absent when it really counted
On 11/7/06, David B. Shemano <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
It seems that you are making a Frederick Douglas type argument -- the Constitution and its principles are correct, but have been misapplied. I don't think that is inconsistent with what I am suggesting. Why could not (or why should not) a socialist society adopt the language of the 1st Amendment as its guiding principle for treatment of dissent in the society? Because the 1st Amendment is very short, it will need interpretation in concrete instances, so why not also see what the Supreme Court has done with concrete instances? It would have no obligation to be bound, but why reinvent the wheel?
David Shemano First there is the obvious point that paper rights go only so far. A socialist society may be do no better than the U.S. did. The examples Charles gave of the U.S. violating free speech rights is quite accurate. Mind you, the UK (which lacks a formal written constitution) has (on the whole) done worse on free speech rights than the U.S. But I think the first question is the more interesting one. If you don't simply take the anarchist solution and do without a state altogether, how do you ensure that whatever paper rights you give people can be enforced by them against their government? There is no evidence that societies that are more equal along the economic axis are neccesarily strongly civil libertarian. Also there is second (to my mind) less interesting question. If you are going to have formal right to freedom of speech, freedom of press, freedom of religion etc - do you need to explicitly add freedom of thought?
