Student's Guide to Landmark Congressional Laws on the First Amendment (Student's Guide to Landmark Congressional Laws)

264 Pages·2002·0.82 MB·English

by  Clyde E. Willis

STUDENT’S GUIDE TO LANDMARK
CONGRESSIONAL LAWS ON THE
FIRST AMENDMENT
Recent Titles in
Student’sGuide to LandmarkCongressionalLaws
Student’sGuide to LandmarkCongressionalLaws on Education
David Carleton
STUDENT’S GUIDE TO
LANDMARK
CONGRESSIONAL LAWS
ON THE FIRST
AMENDMENT
CLYDE E. WILLIS
STUDENT’S GUIDE TO
LANDMARK CONGRESSIONAL LAWS
John R. Vile, Series Editor
GreenwoodPress
Westport,Connecticut • London
LibraryofCongressCataloging-in-PublicationData
Willis,ClydeE.
Student’sguidetolandmarkcongressionallawsontheFirstAmendment / ClydeE.Willis.
p. cm.—(Student’sguidetolandmarkcongressionallaws,ISSN1537–3150)
Includesbibliographicalreferencesandindex.
ISBN0–313–31416–0(alk.paper)
1. Freedomofspeech—UnitedStates—History—Sources. 2. Freedomofreligion—
UnitedStates—History—Sources. I. Title:Landmarkcongressionallawsonthefirst
amendment. II. Title. III. Series.
KF4770.W55 2002
342.73'085—dc21 2001050137
BritishLibraryCataloguinginPublicationDataisavailable.
Copyright(cid:2)2002byClydeE.Willis
Allrightsreserved.Noportionofthisbookmaybe
reproduced,byanyprocessortechnique,without
theexpresswrittenconsentofthepublisher.
LibraryofCongressCatalogCardNumber:2001050137
ISBN:0–313–31416–0
ISSN:1537–3150
Firstpublishedin2002
GreenwoodPress,88PostRoadWest,Westport,CT06881
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Series Foreword vii
Preface xi
Timeline of Events Related to Congress and the First
Amendment xiii
Introduction xxi
1. Internal Security 1
2. Symbolic Speech 53
3. Election Campaign Activities 63
4. Obscenity 101
5. Intellectual Property: The Copyright Act of 1976 125
6. Labor-Management Relations 139
7. Federally Funded Programs 153
8. Freedom of Religion 167
vi CONTENTS
Appendix A: List of Cited Statutes 213
Appendix B: List of Cited Cases 219
Index 225
Series Foreword
Most of the Founding Fathers who met at the Constitutional Con-
ventioninPhiladelphiainthesummerof1787probablyanticipated
that the legislative branch would be the most powerful of the three
branchesofthenationalgovernmentthattheycreated.Forallprac-
tical purposes, this was the only branch of government with which
the onetime colonists had experience under the Articles of Con-
federation. Moreover, the delegates discussed this branch first and
at greatest length at the convention, the dispute over representa-
tion in this body was one of the convention’s most contentious
issues, and the Founding Fathers made it the subject of the first
and longest article of the new Constitution.
Withthepresidentelectedindirectlythroughanelectoralcollege
andthemembersoftheSupremeCourtappointedbythepresident
withtheadviceandconsentoftheSenateandservingforlifeterms,
the framers of the Constitution had little doubt that Congress—
and especially the House of Representatives, whose members were
directly elected by the people for short two-year terms—would be
closest to the people. As a consequence, they invested Congress
with the awesome “power of the purse” that had been at issue in
the revolutionary dispute with Great Britain, where the colonists’
position had been encapsulated in the phrase “no taxation without
representation.” The framers also entrusted Congress with the
more general right to adopt laws to carry out a variety of enumer-
ated powers and other laws “necessary and proper” to the imple-
mentation of these powers—the basis for the doctrine of implied
powers.
viii SERIES FOREWORD
Wars and the threats of wars have sometimes tilted the modern
balance of power toward the president, who has gained in a media
age from his position as a single individual. Still, Congress has ar-
guablybeenthemostpowerfulbranchofgovernmentoverthelong
haul, and one might expect its power to increase with the demise
of the Cold War. Especially in the aftermath of President Franklin
D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great
Societyprogram,thenumberandcomplexityoflawshaveincreased
with the complexity of modern society and the multitude of de-
mands that citizens have placed on modern governments. Courts
have upheld expansive interpretations of federal powers under the
commerce clause, the war-powers provisions, and the power to tax
and spend for the general welfare, and in recent elections Demo-
cratic and Republican candidates alike have often called for expan-
sive new federal programs.
It has been noted that there are 297 words in the Ten Com-
mandments, 463 in the Bill of Rights, 266 in the Gettysburg Ad-
dress, and more than 26,000 in a federal directive regulating the
price of cabbage. Although the U.S. Constitution can be carried in
one’s pocket, the compilation of federal laws in the U.S. Code and
the U.S. Code Annotated requires many volumes, not generally avail-
able in high-school and public libraries. Perhaps because of this
modern prolixity and complexity, students often consider the anal-
ysis of laws to be the arcane domain of lawyers and law reviewers.
Ironically, scholars, like this author, who focus on law, and espe-
cially constitutional law, tend to devote more attention to the lan-
guage of judicial decisions interpreting laws than to the laws
themselves.
Because knowledge of laws and their impact needs to be made
morewidelyaccessible,thisseriesonLandmarkCongressionalLaws
presents and examines laws relating to a number of important top-
ics. These currently include education, First Amendment rights,
civil rights, the environment, the rights of young people, women’s
rights, and health and social security. Each subject is a matter of
importance that should be of key interest to high-school and col-
lege students. A college professor experienced in communicating
ideas to undergraduates has compiled each of these volumes. Each
author has selected major laws in his or her subject area and has
described the politics of these laws, considering such aspects as
their adoption, their interpretation, and their impact.
The laws in each volume are arrangedchronologically.Theentry
SERIES FOREWORD ix
on each law features an introduction that explains the law, its sig-
nificance, and its place within the larger tapestry of legislation on
the issues. A selection from the actual text of the law itself follows
the introduction. This arrangement thus provides ready access to
texts that are often difficult for students to find while highlighting
major provisions, often taken from literally hundreds of pages, that
students and scholars might spend hours to distill on their own.
These volumes are designed to be profitable to high-school and
college students who are examining various public policy issues.
They should also help interested citizens, scholars, and legal prac-
titioners needing a quick, but thorough and accurate, introduction
to a specific area of public policy-making. Although each book is
designed to cover highlights of the entire history of federal legis-
lationwithinagivensubjectarea,theauthorsofthesevolumeshave
also designed them so that individuals who simply need to know
the background and major provisions of a single law (the Civil
Rights Act of 1964, for example) can quickly do so.
The Founding Fathers of the United States devised a system of
federalism dividing power between the state and national govern-
ments. Thus, in many areas of legislation, even acompleteoverview
of national laws will prove inadequate unless it is supplemented
with knowledge of state and even local laws. This is duly noted in
entries on laws where national legislation is necessarily incomplete
and where powers are shared among the three layers of govern-
ment. The U.S. system utilizes a system of separation of powersthat
divides authority among three branches of the national govern-
ment. Thus, while these volumes keep the focus on legislation,they
also note major judicial decisions and presidential initiatives relat-
ing to the laws covered.
Although the subjects of this series are worthy objects of study in
their own right, they are especially appropriate topics for students
and scholars in a system of representative democracy like the
United States, where citizens who are at least eighteen years of age
have the right to choose those who will represent them in public
office. In government, those individuals, like James Madison, Abra-
ham Lincoln, and Woodrow Wilson, who have acquired thelongest
and clearest view of the past are frequently those who can also see
the farthest into the future. This series is presented in the hope
that it will help students both to understand the past and to equip
themselves for future lives of good citizenship.
This editor wishes to thank his friends at Greenwood Press, his
x SERIES FOREWORD
colleagues both at his own university and at other institutions of
higher learning who have done such an able job of highlighting
and explaining the laws that are the focus of this series, and those
students, scholars, and citizens who have respondedbyreadingand
utilizingthese volumes. When theFoundingFathersdrewupacon-
stitution, they depended not only on a set of structures and rights
but also on the public-spiritedness and education of futurecitizens.
When Benjamin Franklin was asked what form of government the
Founding Fathers had created, he reportedly responded, “A repub-
lic, if you can keep it.” When we inform ourselves and think deeply
about the government’s role in major areas of public policy, we
honor the faith and foresight of those who bequeathed this gov-
ernment to us.
John R. Vile
Middle Tennessee State University