Friday, February 17th, 2012 at 9:09 am
The good news is that Republican lawmakers in Arizona are now retreating from their recent proposal to require teachers to limit their speech to words that comply with FCC regulations on what can be said on TV or radio — a half-baked idea rightly characterized by one critic as the “most hilariously unconstitutional piece of legislation that I’ve seen in quite some time.”
The bad news is that, Arizona’s foolishness aside, when it comes to the free-speech rights of teachers, or any other public employee, the joke is still on us.
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Wednesday, January 25th, 2012 at 9:30 am
Anytime you hear government officials mandating new behaviors to a broad swath of the population, that mandate is likely to run afoul of the First Amendment. And so it is with President Obama’s announcement last night that all states must “require that all students stay in high school until they graduate or turn 18.”
Although Mr. Obama made other pronouncements about education — see Dana Goldstein’s good summary analysis in The Nation — the stay-in-school mandate was the one that caught my ear, since enforcing it would run afoul of both the United States Supreme Court and our historic commitment to religious liberty.
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Saturday, November 12th, 2011 at 3:47 pm
It was a nightmarish image for any American President to consider – U.S. soldiers attacking U.S. veterans in the shadow of the U.S. Capitol. But on July 28, 1932, Herbert Hoover believed it had to be done. “For many weeks,” he announced in a press statement, the veterans gathered in Washington had “been given every opportunity of free assembly, free speech and free petition to the Congress.” Now, he said, “in order to put an end to this . . . defiance of civil authority, I have asked the Army to . . . restore order.”
It had all started peacefully, three months earlier, when the first groups of First World War veterans gathered in the nation’s capital to demand early payment of a bonus Congress had promised them. The payment was not scheduled until 1945, but the veterans could not wait that long. As a result of the Great Depression, many had lost their jobs and been stripped of their life savings, leaving them struggling to keep their families from starving. Believing protest was better than idleness, large groups of veterans – who became known as the Bonus Expeditionary Forces (B.E.F.) – set out for Washington, D.C., to peaceably demand that Congress give them their bonus.
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Categories:
Democracy,
First AmendmentTags: assembly, Bonus Army, Bonus March, DC, free-speech, Herbert Hoover, Occupy DC, OWS, petition, protest
Monday, March 28th, 2011 at 10:08 am
This weekend, Book TV aired coverage of the March 19 discussion of my new book We Must Not Be Afraid to Be Free: Stories of Free Expression in America, which occurred as part of this year’s Virginia Festival of the Book. Aside from a few crowd shots, where it appears people are preparing to have [...]
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Friday, March 18th, 2011 at 9:41 am
On a Saturday evening in March 1919, attorney Robert H. Jackson, age 27, attended a lecture at Jamestown (New York) City Hall. The lecturer, a lawyer named Winter Russell, was a somewhat prominent American Socialist. The lecture occurred in a period of global turmoil, devastation caused by the just-concluded Great War and, in the United States, ideological clashes, violence, law enforcement excesses and widespread unease.
Jackson, who had just completed a short term as Jamestown’s corporation counsel and was building a private law practice, attended Russell’s lecture by assignment. Jamestown’s mayor had appointed Jackson and other lawyers to serve on a committee that evening to “censor” the lecture. It was anticipated, at least by the mayor and other Jamestown leaders, that Russell’s speech might cause disruption and need to be shut down.
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Thursday, February 17th, 2011 at 2:04 pm
As school systems across the state of Wisconsin cancel another day of classes – the result of massive protests in Madison following Governor Scott Walker’s effort to strip educators of the bulk of their collective bargaining rights — I can’t help but think of the old adage that two wrongs don’t make a right. Continue [...]
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Categories:
Democracy,
First Amendment,
Leadership,
Organizational ChangeTags: cesar chavez, collective bargaining, collective capacity, Labor, teachers, teachers unions, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, UN Declaration of Human Rights, Unions, Wisconsin
Thursday, January 27th, 2011 at 8:51 am
My wife likes to tell this one story from when she was in high school, and she asked her U.S. History teacher why the class wasn’t learning more about the Indians. “We don’t have time for the Indians,” he responded. “We have an AP curriculum to get through.”
Had I been as inquisitive as my wife was when I was a teenager, I would have received the same answer. So, I suspect, would most of you; indeed, for too many of us, the study of American history ended up being little more than a linear, logical march through the years – filled with neat plot lines of cause and effect, victors and enemies, and a whole lot of white men.
Like so many others, I didn’t realize there was another way to imagine the chronicling of the American narrative, or the construction of history itself, until I first read Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. Once I did, my understanding of the world was forever changed.
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Monday, January 24th, 2011 at 10:14 am
I know it’s still January, but I’m already looking forward to March 26, when I’ll visit the fabulous National Constitution Center and participate in a program on Civility & Democracy. During that event, which will culminate in a public Town Hall discussion, we’ll have the chance to consider some essential questions of American identity and organization — questions that have been made even more timely in the wake of the public debate following the shootings in Tucson:
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Categories:
Democracy,
First AmendmentTags: civility, Democracy, first amendment, Founding Fathers, George Will, Hugo Black, National Constitution Center, political climate, Samuel Huntington, Tucson
Monday, January 17th, 2011 at 6:41 am
Today, Americans will pay tribute to the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. with school assemblies, community programs and — to the delight of students and adults alike — a national holiday. Yet few if any Americans, at this crucial time in our nation’s history, will directly connect King’s heroism and accomplishments to his faith in — and use of — our primary tools of democracy, the five freedoms of the First Amendment.
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Monday, October 25th, 2010 at 11:54 am
In case you missed it, there was a major case last week involving the First Amendment rights of teachers to make curricular content decisions. The 6th Circuit Court of Appeals’ ruling puts another nail in the coffin of the free-speech rights of public employees.
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