In the fourth volume of his famous Commentaries on the Laws of England, published in 1769, William Blackstone argued that freedom of the press under the common law was limited to a prohibition on prior restraints.
The Blaine amendment was a proposed 1876 amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Roger Williams began his religious career as a Puritan minister, and when he arrived in Massachusetts in 1630 he was initially well received.
The blue wall of silence is an unwritten code that prohibits police officers from providing adverse information against fellow officers. In essence, the code states that ‘‘cops don’t tell on cops.’’
In Board of Education of the Westside Community Schools v. Mergens, a public school board denied students’ request to form a Christian club and meet after school on school premises.
One of the most contentious church–state issues in the United States has been the question of the constitutionality of government aid to religious schools.
Drug testing of students by public school officials constitutes a search that must be reasonable under the Fourth Amendment. In Board of Education v. Earls, the Court addressed the lawfulness of warrantless, suspicionless drug testing of students.
In Board of Education v. Pico, the sharply divided Court held that the school board violated the students’ First Amendment rights by removing from high school and junior high school libraries several books that the board found ‘‘anti-American, anti- Christian, anti-Semitic, and just plain filthy.’’
Kiryas Joel involved a striking fact situation: a public school district created to serve only the disabled children of an ultra-Orthodox Jewish sect.
Federal law provides that ‘‘[c]orporations organized and operated exclusive for religious, charitable, or educational purposes’’ are entitled to tax-exempt status.
The First Amendment provides that ‘‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.’’
Since the mid-1970s, it has been clear that commercial speech can be protected free speech under the First Amendment. However, it is typically accorded lesser protection than noncommercial speech.
Bond v. Floyd arose from the intersection of the struggle for civil rights and the protest movement against U.S. involvement in Vietnam, two political movements that had a dramatic impact on the United States in the 1960s.
In Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury wrote about a world in which the responsibility of fire fighters was to burn books rather than to extinguish fires.
When we think of adjudicating guilt, we think of trials—witnesses questioned, lawyers locked in forensic combat, juries attentive to the subtleties of the case in preparation for their deliberations, and the verdict that will ultimately puncture the tension in the courtroom.