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One Person’s Villain is Another’s Hero

Rating - 5 stars

Posted: February 1, 2005

War excites passions.

The nation itself may find itself in peril; thousands, perhaps millions of lives are at risk.  It is often thought that dissent during wartime is tantamount to being disloyal.  This view puzzles libertarians.  They view it as patriotism's highest manifestation.

During wartime, the line between dissent and disloyalty is cloudy.   The First Amendment, prohibiting Congress from enacting any law abridging freedom of speech, is put to the test.

Some judges and legal scholars reason the First Amendment is essential to self-government.  They argue the First Amendment promotes character traits that are essential to a robust democracy:  skepticism, personal responsibility, curiosity, distrust of authority and independent thinking.

“The best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market,” wrote one of my favorite Supreme Court justices, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Geoffrey Stone, the former dean of law provost at the University of Chicago, identifies six periods of widespread free-speech repression, dating back to the administration of the nation's second president, John Adams, and continuing through the Vietnam era.  He identifies three principles that shape the Supreme Court’s understanding of the First Amendment.

1.         No government paternalism in the realm of political discourse.

2.         Punish the actor, not the speaker.

3.         Differentiate between low- and high-value speech.

This is a book about Americans struggling with the responsibilities of self-government during times of war.  It is about the presidents who struggled balancing liberty and security.  It is about the justices of the Supreme Court who attempted to define the difference.  More importantly, it is about those individuals who had the courage to dissent during perilous times.  Some were fools; others were villains; some were individuals of great moral courage.

Geoffrey Stone has written a timely masterpiece about individual Americans who struggled to preserve our liberties.

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