Madison's Music
On Reading the First Amendment
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- € 13,99
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- € 13,99
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“A detailed history of the transformation of First Amendment law” from one of the nation’s foremost civil liberties lawyers (The New York Times).
Are you sitting down? It turns out that everything you learned about the First Amendment is wrong. For too long, we’ve been treating small, isolated snippets of the text as infallible gospel without looking at the masterpiece of the whole. Legal luminary Burt Neuborne argues that the structure of the First Amendment as well as of the entire Bill of Rights was more intentional than most people realize, beginning with the internal freedom of conscience and working outward to freedom of expression and finally freedom of public association. This design, Neuborne argues, was not to protect discrete individual rights—such as the rights of corporations to spend unlimited amounts of money to influence elections—but to guarantee that the process of democracy continues without disenfranchisement, oppression, or injustice.
Neuborne, who was the legal director of the ACLU and has argued numerous cases before the Supreme Court, invites us to hear the “music” within the form and content of Madison’s carefully formulated text. When we hear Madison’s music, a democratic ideal flowers in front of us, and we can see that the First Amendment gives us the tools to fight for campaign finance reform, the right to vote, equal rights in the military, the right to be full citizens, and the right to prevent corporations from riding roughshod over the weakest among us. Neuborne gives us an eloquent lesson in democracy that informs and inspires.
“In the dark art of lawyering, Neuborne has always been considered a white knight.” —New York
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Neubourne, a New York University law professor who founded the Brennan Center for Justice, argues that the Supreme Court's misreading of the First Amendment has done lasting harm to the body politic. He severely criticizes the Court, stating that justices have built a "dysfunctional democracy" and have "tolerated or perpetuated virtually every undemocratic practice that currently burdens American democracy." Neubourne places much of the blame on the Court's failure to give meaning to the Amendment's reference to "freedom of speech," criticizing appeals to literalism or "what's sometimes called originalism." Neubourne also passionately dismantles the Supreme Court's view of how the first amendment should operate when there are conflicts between the theoretical right of free speech and the rights of those affected by the speech. In his view, the Court has gone too far in protecting the speech at the expense of those that must endure the speech. Neubourne's reading of the Amendment is radically different than traditionalists in many respects; perhaps most inventive is his argument that the Amendment's provisions on free association provide a Constitutional justification to undo gerrymandering and a host of other limitations on the right to vote. All in all, a provocative and well-conceived book that will resonate with liberal America and in some instances with conservative Americans as well.
