Congress Shall Make No Law: The First Amendment, Unprotected Expression, and the U.S. Supreme Court (Free Expression in America) - Tapa dura

David O'Brien provides readers a wonderful tour through the first amendment, with particular emphasis on all the free speech issues in which 'no law' in the constitutional text has never meant 'no law' in constitutional law or practice. -- Mark Graber, University of Maryland School of Law David O'Brien has made an extremely important contribution to our understanding of the First Amendment. In providing a compelling and lucid discussion of the history and evolution of free expression, he has clearly shown that the protections guaranteed by the First Amendment are as indispensable as they are fragile. -- Richard Labunski, University of Kentucky Professor David O'Brien's Congress Shall Make No Law is a very timely book. It examines the phenomenon of so-called 'unprotected speech' just as the Supreme Court is trying to answer whether additional categories of expression should be excluded from the protection of the First Amendment. -- Robert Corn-Revere, Supreme Court litigator of First Amendment issues, Davis Wright Tremaine LLP A succinct and scholarly book.... both informative and provocative....In addition to providing a good read, the book is well suited for consideration by a book discussion group. * Sunday Star Ledger, September 26, 2010 * Ever since Justice Hugo Black declared that the First Amendment's guaranty of speech liberty is absolute-because "no law" means "no law"-generations of legal scholars, judges, and practitioners have struggled to explain the dissonance between the unconditional protection promised by the Constitution's text and the limited protection recognized by the Supreme Court's constitutional interpretations. In the first such work of its kind, David O'Brien describes clearly and coherently the doctrinal parameters of unprotected speech categories and the most important jurisprudential reasons for their existence. This is a volume that should be of interest to all students of the First Amendment. -- David M. Skover, Fredric C. Tausend Professor of Law, Seattle University School of Law In Congress Shall Make No Law David O'Brien, the Leone Reaves and George W. Spicer Professor at the University of Virginia, provides a handy and insightful...precis of the Supreme Court's jurisprudence.... It remains an excellent summary of a complicated area of law. * American Review of Politics *

The First Amendment declares that 'Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech , or of the press. . . . ' Yet, in the following 200 years, the Supreme Court has defined certain categories of expression-the obscene, the defamatory, commercial, and fighting words or disruptive expression-as constitutionally unprotected. Noted legal scholar David O'Brien provides a history of each category of unprotected speech and puts into bold relief the larger questions of what kinds of expression should (and should not) receive First Amendment protection.