No Liberty for License: The Forgotten Logic of the First Amendment - Hardcover

Lowenthal, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0965320847 ISBN 13: 9780965320849

Publisher: Spence Pub, 1997

Synopsis

In an original and iconoclastic reessment of the First Amendment, a distinguished political philosopher reaches unorthodox yet compelling conclusions about the place of speech and religion in the American constitutional order. Revisiting the internal logic of the Amendment's language and the culture from which it emerged, Professor David Lowenthal attacks the legacy of Holmes and Brandeis, whose judicial heirs have twisted the First Amendment into a vehicle for degrading and destabilizing the republic it was meant to strengthen and preserve. Professor Lowenthal demonstrates that the framers of the Constitution and Bill of Rights had an understanding of dom quite different from that to which we have grown accustomed. They saw that dom without limits degenerates into mere license, itself a threat to dom, and devised the First Amendment to the political doms requisite for republican self-government. Lowenthal then examines the modern Supreme Court's treatment of revolutionary groups, obscenity, and church-state questions, showing how in each area the Court has been led astray by its fixation on individual rights at the expense of the common good and the health of the republic.

Edition details

• Publisher: Spence Pub
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0965320847
• ISBN 13: 9780965320849
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1