No Recent Free Speech Cases
We've been in the War on Terror ever since 9/11. And there hasn't been a single major case in that time about the First Amendment.
I grew interested in this topic because of the court case Schenck v. U.S. (1917), which was the first American precedent for limiting free speech during wartime. After Schenck, the next several conflicts, like the Vietnam War, that the U.S. was involved in provoked similar Supreme Court cases about the limitation of free speech during war. But not so for our most recent and currently ongoing conflict.
That might be because for there to be an alteration to the First Amendment, there also has to exist some sort of protest; we haven't seen much of that. Instead, most of recent attention has been, understandably, on the president, or domestic policies like gay rights, gun violence, etc. Right now, I don't think most people even know we're still bombing people out in Yemen.
Another reason the article I read proposed was that due to the Patriot Act and all the other blanket surveillance laws put into place after 9/11, the U.S. government do longer needs to publicly detain and sentence people. They often have the information of dissenters right in hand. And unlike in other times, like the Red Scare, the surveillance used isn't that obvious. So Americans might feel that they have nothing to protest against, the breach of privacy quiet and the war so far removed from their daily lives.
Though there have been cases about free speech, they're far more in the realm of hate speech or Internet rights, and not strictly governmental. Overall, I find it a little discomfiting that maybe we've been so distracted by daily entertainment and digital life to notice the war our government is throwing so much money into. And thus that war might continue to be fought, even if we've long lost sight of the point.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2010/11/why-hasn-t-the-war-against-terrorism-produced-any-great-first-amendment-cases.html
I grew interested in this topic because of the court case Schenck v. U.S. (1917), which was the first American precedent for limiting free speech during wartime. After Schenck, the next several conflicts, like the Vietnam War, that the U.S. was involved in provoked similar Supreme Court cases about the limitation of free speech during war. But not so for our most recent and currently ongoing conflict.
That might be because for there to be an alteration to the First Amendment, there also has to exist some sort of protest; we haven't seen much of that. Instead, most of recent attention has been, understandably, on the president, or domestic policies like gay rights, gun violence, etc. Right now, I don't think most people even know we're still bombing people out in Yemen.
Another reason the article I read proposed was that due to the Patriot Act and all the other blanket surveillance laws put into place after 9/11, the U.S. government do longer needs to publicly detain and sentence people. They often have the information of dissenters right in hand. And unlike in other times, like the Red Scare, the surveillance used isn't that obvious. So Americans might feel that they have nothing to protest against, the breach of privacy quiet and the war so far removed from their daily lives.
Though there have been cases about free speech, they're far more in the realm of hate speech or Internet rights, and not strictly governmental. Overall, I find it a little discomfiting that maybe we've been so distracted by daily entertainment and digital life to notice the war our government is throwing so much money into. And thus that war might continue to be fought, even if we've long lost sight of the point.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2010/11/why-hasn-t-the-war-against-terrorism-produced-any-great-first-amendment-cases.html
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