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First Amendment Pros And Cons

Decent Essays

As Thomas Hobbes asserts in his book “Leviathan”, the foundation of modern society is built on a social contract between states and population to legitimate the authority of the state over the individual. A compromise in such covenants is the renouncement of certain “natural” rights by the citizen in return for the assurance of security. This, however, does not entail the forfeit of every single right and an absolute submission of the people to governmental authority. To ensure human dignity and to prevent emergence of an autocratic governmental system, the Founding Fathers enacted constitutional provisions determining rights of defense against the state. Even though these rights were not part of the original version of the Constitution, they were enacted through the Bill of Rights shortly afterwards as an amendment to the Constitution. One of those fundamental rights is the freedom of press: “Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech, or the press”. From the formulation of this provision the Supreme Court established for a long time that this provision would solely apply to the federal government. However, under the doctrine of incorporation, the Fourteenth Amendment imposes the First Amendment prohibitions on the state level. Hence, the First Amendment binds federal as well as state governments. Thus, the Constitution guarantees the free flow of information nationwide, which constitutes the fundament for and consequently is indispensible to the

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