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Garry Dale Kelly's avatar

So which half of the legal profession should I be concerned for, the half that can bearly stomach me, or the half that actively hates me?

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Jack Jordan's avatar

Leonard Levy in a 1999 book that is very well worth reading these days (Origins of the Bill of Rights) emphasized crucial truths about our First Amendment rights and freedoms. Sadly, such self-evident truths have become, as John Stuart Mill put it, "dead dogma." Too often too many speak and think of the First Amendment as if its scant words somehow created or defined the freedom of speech and press and the right to assemble and petition. Levy highlighted the egregious error of such thought and speech.

"In a sense, the constitutional guarantee of freedom of the press" and speech and the rights to assemble and petition "signified nothing new. It did not augment or expand freedom of the press" and speech or the right to assemble and petition government. The First Amendment's declarations regarding the freedom of speech and press and the rights to assemble and petition the government merely "recognized and perpetuated an existing condition."

Clearly, well before the First Amendment was written or ratified, our original Constitution established that all "Government in the United States derived from the people, who reserved a right to alter it, and [all] government was accountable to the people. That required a broader legal concept of freedom of the press" and speech than existed previously. "Thus freedom of the press" (and speech) "meant the right to criticize harshly the government, its officers, and its policies as well as to comment on matters of public concern."

"The scope of the amendment," most fundamentally and crucially, "is determined by the nature of the government and its relation to the people." Absolutely all American "government is the people's servant, exists by their consent and for their benefit, and is constitutionally limited" by the people and is "responsible" to the people. Our Constitution confirmed that in America, the people are the only true "sovereigns;" the people are not the "subjects" of any "master." The "protections" of our Constitution are "indispensable" for "the development of free people in a free society;" they "are not to be the playthings of momentary majorities" or of any public servant in any branch of any level of government.

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