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The Revolution in Freedoms of Press and Speech - From Blackstone to the First Amendment and Fox's Libel Act (Hardcover)
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The Revolution in Freedoms of Press and Speech - From Blackstone to the First Amendment and Fox's Libel Act (Hardcover)
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This book discusses the revolutionary broadening of concepts of
freedom of press and freedom of speech in Great Britain and in
America in the late eighteenth century, in the period that produced
state declarations of rights and then the First Amendment and Fox's
Libel Act. The conventional view of the history of freedoms of
press and speech is that the common law since antiquity defined
those freedoms narrowly, and that Sir William Blackstone in 1769,
and Lord Chief Justice Mansfield in 1770, faithfully summarized the
common law in giving a very narrow definition of those freedoms as
mere liberty from prior restraint and not liberty from punishment
after something was printed or spoken. This book proposes, to the
contrary, that Blackstone carefully selected the narrowest
definition that had been suggested in popular essays in the prior
seventy years, in order to oppose the growing claims for much
broader protections of press and speech. Blackstone misdescribed
his summary as an accepted common law definition, which in fact did
not exist. A year later, Mansfield inserted a similar definition
into the common law for the first time, also misdescribing it as a
long-accepted definition, and soon misdescribed the unique rules
for prosecuting sedition as having an equally ancient pedigree.
Blackstone and Mansfield were not declaring the law as it had long
been, but were leading a counter-revolution about the breadth of
freedoms of press and speech, and cloaking it as a summary of a
narrow common law doctrine that in fact was nonexistent. That
conflict of revolutionary view and counter-revolutionary view
continues today. For over a century, a neo-Blackstonian view has
been dominant, or at least very influential, among historians.
Contrary to those narrow claims, this book concludes that the broad
understanding of freedoms of press and speech was the dominant
context of the First Amendment and of Fox's Libel Act, and that it
enjoyed greater historical support.
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