Emergence of a Free Press
Books / Paperback
ISBN: 0195042409 / Publisher: Oxford University Press, January 1987
What did "freedom of the press" really mean to the framers of the First Amendment and their contemporaries? This book by historian Leonard W. Levy answers that question. In Emergence of a Free Press (a revised and enlarged edition of his Legacy of Suppression), Mr. Levy argues that the First Amendment was not designed to be the bulwark of a free press as many thought, nor had the amendment's framers intended to overturn the common law of seditious libel that was the principal means of stifling political dissent. Yet he notes how robust and rambunctious the early press was, and he takes that paradox into account in tracing the succession of cases and reforms that figures in the genesis of a free press.
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Leonard W. Levy's Legacy of Suppression so disturbed Supreme Court Justice Hugo L. Black that he called it "one of the mosts devastating blows that has been delivered against civil liberty for a long time." Published in 1960, this book challenged the liberal interpretation of the FirstAmendment by claiming that the framers of the Constitution intended it only as a protection against the prior restraint of a publication. It was not, Levy vehemently argued, meant to be used as a defense in seditious libel cases. In other words, freedom of the press meant that a publisher had thefreedom to publish, but not without impunity. In Emergence of Free Press, Levy rethinks many of the controversial opinions put forth in the original work. A revised and enlarged edition of the first volume, it offers a more moderate view of the rights guaranteed by the First Amendment. Based on extensive additional research, especiallyon the newspapers published in Revolutionary America, Levy now concedes that the original interpretation of the First Amendment, even if it wasn't the framers' intention, was broad in scope. "That so many courageous and irresponsible editors risked imprisonment amazes me," he writes. Though heholds to his belief in the writers' intention, he concludes that we don't have to be limited by their narrow view.
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