Popular Law-making: A study of the origin, history, and present tendencies of law-making by statuteStimson, Frederic Jesup
History
Popular Law-making: A study of the origin, history, and present tendencies of law-making by statute
Stimson, Frederic Jesup
Legislation -- United States
meeting; freedom of the press, however, is the same constitutional
principle in both countries, but only extends to the right to publish
without previously obtaining the consent of any censor or other
authority, and the person publishing still remains responsible for
all damages caused by such act. It is this part of the law which Mr.
Gompers would alter, or rather make absolute; so that any notice or
threat could be printed and circulated even when a component act of a
conspiracy.
By a recent act of Congress the right of freedom of speech does not
extend to anarchistic utterances, or speeches or writings aimed
against order, the established government, and inciting to
assassination or crime. Such laws are barely constitutional as applied
to United States citizens. The unpopularity of the alien and sedition
laws under the administration of John Adams will be remembered. Since
their repeal, no attempt at a law of government libel has been made;
very recently, however, where certain gentlemen, mostly holding
important government offices, were charged with having made money
out of the Panama Canal purchase, the weight and influence of the
administration was given to the attempt to indict them and bring them
to the courts of the central government at Washington for trial. This
attempt, however, failed in the courts, as, in the Wilkes case, it had
failed more than a century before at the bar of public opinion.
But the law is, of course, much stronger as to persons not citizens.
That is to say, no one has any right to immigrate into this country,
and therefore intending immigrants may be kept out by legislation if
they are anarchists, socialists, or, indeed, hold any opinion for the
moment unpopular with Congress. The attempt has so far, however, not
been made to keep out any but violent anarchists, and, of course,
persons who are diseased, of immoral life, or likely to become a
public charge. And the attempt to keep them under the hand of the
central government for years after they have taken their place for
good or ill in the State body politic has recently failed in a
monumental case vindicating anew the Tenth Amendment.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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