What should I include in my postgraduate personal statement?
Corwin frequently pointed out that this bad tendency test was the same standard that proponents of sociological jurisprudence applied whenever litigants challenged the constitutionality of any governmental regulation. His contributions to the War Cyclopedia asserted that the "necessary and proper" clause vested Congress with broad power to interfere with both the liberty of speech and the liberty of contract. Courts, he maintained, must "sustain any legislation which is reasonably calculated to promote the general welfare, if there is no other objection to it other than its effect on private rights."34 Indeed, the general progressive revulsion against all individual liberties was the first premise of Corwin's attack on constitutional free-speech rights. While under "the uncomplicated conditions of frontier life" one might have been able to talk meaningfully of "inalienable rights," he claimed that under modern conditions, "the pursuit of happiness has become a joint-stock enterprise in which the welfare of all is Corwin opposed "the curtailment of legislative discretion by definitive, unbending constitutional limitations," whether in the name of an individual's expression or propertyThey not only structure the works of such proponents of broad expression rights as Chafee, Alexander Meiklejohn, and Emerson, but they also provide starting places for other scholars concerned with some feature of this country's ongoing experience with the problems presented by free speech. The most prominent conservative treatise writers never accepted the incorporation doctrine and interpreted narrowly the privileges and immunities clause. [76] Rather, they maintained the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee that no state could "deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law" was the source of constitutional protections for the fundamental rights of the individual, rights that included both the freedom of speech and the freedom of contract. In their view, this clause restricted governmental power over life, liberty, and property and did not simply guarantee that certain procedures would be provided whenever states sought to infringe those individual rights. The most frequently cited passage in Constitutional Limitations was Cooley's assertion that whenever "government . . .
The defendants in that case had merely asked their fellow citizens to boycott the businesses of persons who were urging prosecution of a nudist colony "until these invaders will come to see the brutal mistake of their action. " Without commenting on the legality of such a boycott, the Court's unanimous opinion stated that "by indirection but unmistakably" such language "encourages and incites a persistence in what we must assume would be a breach of the state laws against indecent exposure. "[95] Applying for a scholarship implies writing a personal statement or a similar paper. If you want to succeed in it, look at multiple examples or even templates available online. Your main task is to highlight your strength and motivation. Suppose you can write about a topic that clarifies what a great college student you will beits excellent! Try to use your personal statement to show your incredible drive and resilient character inside the classroom and out. But again, dont lie or exaggerate. Beneath the brilliance of the Whitney concurrence lurked difficulties that haunted early civil libertarian efforts to develop a new constitutional defense of free speech.
Detroit Free Press, made "any attempt at public discussion practically worthless. "[123] Moreover, if the Constitution prohibits state interference with private attempts to influence the marketplace of ideas, then the social and economic policies that civil libertarians assign to legislatures in democratic societies violate the First Amendment. By limiting the money a person can earn, elected officials restrict an individual's political behavior. For example, the maximum-hour law considered by the Court in Lochner v. New York prevented employees from working overtime to be able to contribute to a political campaign. Reformers could not argue that the ten-hour day was a labor regulation that incidentally affected expression rights. Civil libertarians insist that economic and social programs should be designed to affect the distribution of political resources. The major purpose of economic policies, these commentators state, is to increase the ability of some and decrease the ability of others to influence debate on matters of public importance. Thus, if money is speech, state efforts to regulate both the commercial marketplace and the marketplace of ideas are unconstitutional.
Late twentieth-century academic lawyers rarely provide Justice Brennan or his brethren with any guidance as to the correct civil libertarian position on First Amendment spending rights. Although general constitutional and free-speech theories have been growth industries in the 1970s and 1980s, jurists continue to treat content regulations as posing the paradigmatic First Amendment questions and remain relatively unconcerned with mixed questions of speech and property. Not surprisingly, most scholars defend standards of judicial protection designed to resolve the various relationships between speech and crime or social harm. Rarely are such rules of adjudication germane to the constitutional relationships between expression and economics. Proponents of this relativist defense of democracy strongly supported pluralism and civil liberties. In their view all democratic communities respected expression rights. Seymour Lip-set and Earl Rabb praised "a society which tends to protect and nurture the independent coexistence of different political entities, ethnic groups, ideas. " Bell spoke of "the verities of free speech, free press, the right of opposition and of free inquiry. "5 Indeed, influenced by T. W.
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v. Sullivan and numerous other opinions on First Amendment rights, was unusually reticent in cases involving contemporary problems. He did not discuss the constitutional relationships between free speech and private property until Federal Elections Commission v. Massachusetts Citizens for Life (1986). 124 His majority opinion in that case held that certain restrictions on corporate campaign donations could not be applied to some nonprofit entities. More generally, Justice Brennan suggested that "corporate spending on political activity" could be regulated to ensure that "resources amassed in the economic marketplace" are not "used to provide an unfair advantage in the political marketplace. " Thus, in Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce, Justice Brennan voted to sustain a state statute barring nonprofit corporations that solicited funds from for-profit corporations from spending money on behalf of political candidates. That restriction, Justice Marshall's majority opinion held, "reduces the threat that huge corporate treasuries amassed with the aid of favorable state laws will be used to influence unfairly the outcome of elections. "125 Although civil libertarians had consistently endorsed government policies that equalized opportunities for political participation, the Burger/Rehnquist Court has refused to constitutionalize their ideals.
"86 On these grounds, Justice Benjamin Cardozo, another prominent proponent of sociological jurisprudence, stated that one of his rules for deciding cases was "when the social needs demand one settlement rather than another, there are times There are lots of great resources out there with tips and advice on postgraduate university personal statements and UCAS applications, including: Writing poetry also figures prominently in my academic and professional goals. I have just begun submitting to the smaller journals with some success and am gradually building a working manuscript for a collection. The dominant theme of this collection relies on poems that draw from classical, biblical, and folk traditions, as well as everyday experience, in order to celebrate the process of giving and taking life, whether literal or figurative. My poetry draws from and influences my academic studies. Much of what I read and study finds a place in my creative work as subject. At the same time, I study the art of literature by taking part in the creative process, experimenting with the tools used by other authors in the past. Justice Brennan, the author of New York Times Co.
Such legislation was constitutional only if "clearly necessary to correct a grave abuse in the operation of the system and [was] narrowly limited to that end. " In particular, Emerson declared that restrictions on the money persons could spend to promote their ideas must "not limit the content of expression; . . . [must operate] equitably and with no undue advantage to any group or point of view; . . . [must be] in the nature of a regulation and not a prohibition; . . . [must] not substantially impair the area of expression controlled; . . . [must] be specifically formulated in objective terms and reasonably free of the possibility of administrative abuse. " Legislation only satisfied this standard, if "limited to restrictions (1) on the candidate himself, (2) in an election campaign. "41 Teenth-century legal treatise writers. "During the whole of the nineteenth century," he falsely asserted, "the philosophical and political principles which underlay the constitutional guarantees [of free speech were] forgotten for lack of constant assertion and examination of them. " Similarly, he ignored such libertarian utterances as Cooley's majority opinion in Atkinson v. Detroit Free Press and Harlan's dissent in Patterson v.
82 (quoting Abrams v. United States, 250 U. S. 616, 630 [1919] [Holmes, J. , dissenting]). In the following years, the Court expanded the protection the First Amendment gave to wealthy political activists. In 1978, the justices held that corporations had constitutional free-speech rights. Citing Meiklejohn and Emerson, Justice Powell's opinion in First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti asserted that citizens had a constitutional interest in political expression from any source. "The inherent worth of the speech in terms of its capacity for informing the public," he insisted, "does not depend upon the identity of its source, whether corporation, association, union, or individual. "97 While Powell endorsed traditional strictures against corporate contributions to individual candidates,98 he claimed that Massachusetts could not restrict corporate advocacy on matters of public interest. Two years later, in Citizens Against Rent Control v. Berkeley, Chief Justice Burger asserted that persons had a constitutional right to make unlimited contributions "to committees formed to favor or op- Although the Supreme Court rejected this position in Slaughter-House and subsequent cases, many conservatives continued to insist that the provisions of the Bill of Rights were among the privileges and immunities of United States citizens.
Colorado. Without referring to any case by name, Chafee merely commented that earlier judicial opinions broadly interpreting constitutional expression rights were "precedents of very dubious value" because they "seem to ignore so seriously the economic and political facts of our time. "14 111. Curtis (1986), p. 186. Tucker was one of many prominent conservative jurists who presented free-speech claims to the Supreme Court. Tucker was brought into the Spies case by Roger A. Pryor, a Wall Street attorney who helped defend the sugar monopoly against prosecution under the Sherman Anti-Trust Act in United States v. E. C. Knight Co. See Avrich (1984), p. 334. The main attorney for the E. C. Knight Company was John O. Johnson, who later sought to persuade the Court in Twining v. New Jersey that the Fourteenth Amendment incorporated all the provisions of the Bill of Rights. Johnson et al. (1908), p. 51. For a fuller discussion of Johnson's legal activities, which included constitutional attacks on virtually every piece of commercial regulation passed by the federal government at the turn of the century, see Winkelman (1942).
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The opinion began not with bold assertions of what the constitutional framers thought,100 but with substantial reservations about judicial capacity to protect expression rights. In contrast to conservative libertarian jurists, Brandeis did not think courts were authorized to safeguard individual freedoms. He specifically contended that the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment only limited the procedures that state governments could use when they sought to deprive a person of life, liberty, or Moreover, after rejecting the traditional constitutional defense of free speech, Brandeis refused to articulate a workable alternative. He merely proclaimed that speech was the same sort of right the Court was now committed to protecting. The judicial obligation to respect precedent, he concluded, overrode the otherwise superior logic of the new constitutional attack on free speech. Sociological jurisprudence encouraged judicial activism and creativity in common law cases.
In case you need to send it as a Word document file, use a standard font like 12 point Arial or Times New Roman. Do not make tiny or huge margins. At least one conservative on the federal bench expressed similar antipathy toward wartime speech restrictions. In one of the most publicized sedition trials of that era, Judge George M. Bourquin held that a charge of sedition could not constitutionally be sustained against a person who made several pro-German remarks during a heated dispute in a bar. Bourquin, a Taft appointee whose economic decisions espoused an individualistic approach to the law,[114] held that the defendant in United States v. Hall could not be convicted of a criminal offense in the absence of evidence that he "inten[ded] to interfere with . . . the military and naval forces" of the United States. "The genius of democracy and the spirit of our people," Bourquin commented, refused to tolerate "crimes" such as "slanders and libels of government and its officers.
Prewar politics did not force Pound or other progressives to confront legislation that explicitly restricted free speech. For the first fifteen years of the twentieth century the elected branches of government were neither passing nor enforcing limitations on the scope of legitimate political dissent. Thus, before World War I, most progressives were unaware of the potential that pragmatism and sociological jurisprudence had for tolerating narrow interpretations of free-speech rights. The burning constitutional question of that period was the status of the freedom of contract. Pragmatism and sociological jurisprudence proved to be powerful rhetorical tools in the progressive fight for economic, political, and social reform. Because they "succeed[ed] in their office," progressives considered those ideas "reliable, sound, good, [and] true. " Nevertheless, one important consequence of this wholesale adoption of pragmatism and sociological jurisprudence emerged: when federal and state governments began to pass legislation explicitly restricting political dissent, the dominant mode of legal argument in the United States was either actively hostile to the then "traditional" conservative libertarian defense of constitutional expression rights or, at best, silent about the nature of a sound constitutional defense of free speech.
Adorno's pathbreaking study of authoritarian personalities, prominent scholars suggested that many intolerant persons were suffering from mental illnesses or other forms of social pathology. "McCarthyism," Talcott Parsons declared, was "primarily the expression of fear, secondarily of anger, the aggression which is a product of frustration. "6 Chafee maintained that the leading proponents of expression rights had recognized that their arguments for expression rights were independent of those supporting partisan politics. The most important contributors to libertarian theory, he insisted, were persons who successfully divorced their attitudes toward economic and social policies from their attitudes toward free speech. Free Speech in the United States was a celebration of Justice Holmes,32 whom Chafee observed was "much out of patience with the radicalism which judicial opinions placed under the protection of the Constitution," yet "reluctant to stop other men from trying to make things better" because he was "not sure enough of [his] own ideas to be certain that the reformers are wrong. "33 If anyone played the second lead in Chafee's modern history of free speech, that person was Charles Evans Hughes, whom Chafee claimed shared Holmes's attitudes toward economic and social reform.
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In most circumstances, Pound argued, courts could achieve a "jurisprudence of ends" by devising legal doctrines that balanced the various social interests at stake in any Just as Dewey argued that "knowledge of the past is significant only as it deepens and extends our understanding of the present," so Pound claimed that "the function of legal history [was] one of illustrating how rules and principles have met concrete situations in the past and of enabling us to judge how we may deal with such situations in the present. " Precedents, he maintained, should not be understood as "furnishing self-sufficient premises from which rules are to be obtained by rigid deduction. "85 Thus, "the real genius of our common law" was its ability to "giv[e] a fresh illustration of [al principle to a concrete case, producing a workable and just re-suit.
" "If the Government permits conditions to exist which make large classes of citizens financially dependent," then government should assume, "or cause to be assumed by others, in some form the burden incident to its own shortcomings. "69 Progressive defenders of free speech claimed that material deprivations left most persons "so overburdened with toil that there is no leisure nor energy left for the cultivation of the mind. " "Freedom of thought," Dewey noted, is "next to impossible for the masses of men so long as their economic conditions are precarious, and their main problem is to keep the wolf from their doors. "70 Governmental oversight of business conditions was, thus, needed to ensure that persons had the time as well as the independence necessary for effectively exercising their free-speech rights. Brandeis claimed that in a democracy all persons had a right to "free time when body and mind are sufficiently fresh to permit of mental effort. "71 Download the Personal Statement Questionnaire for more assistance with identifying and developing elements you want to include in your finalized personal statement As this comparison suggests, Holmes not only failed to solve the constitutional dilemma of early civil libertarian thought, but he was also never interested in the problem.
"[115] Broadly and individual rights more narrowly when the subject matter was foreign relations. Sutherland, the leading spokesperson for this position, maintained that "in all matters of external sovereignty . . . a rule of constitutional construction obtains which is radically more liberal than that which obtains in the case of the domestic powers which are distributed between the general government and the state. " Principles, he argued, "which would result in curtailing or preventing action on the part of the national government in the enlarged field of world responsibility . . . might prove highly injurious or embarrassing. "[145] Ally privileged. Republican institutions required that political speech be so protected because of the "duty of every one to speak freely what he may have to say concerning public officers, or those who may present themselves for public positions. "[122] Any less-protective interpretation of the First Amendment would unduly burden citizens' participation in politics. Holding persons "to the strict and literal truth of every statement, recital and possible inference," Cooley declared in Atkinson v.
This position is consistent with conservative libertarianism, but subversive of civil libertarianism's call for legislative activity to create the necessary economic prerequisites of a functional system of freedom of expression. Recent works do not, of course, simply repeat Chafee's conclusions. Scholars have challenged his assertions about the relative acceptance of free-speech rights at various periods of American history and the precise standards that he thought were required by the democratic-process model of First Amendment adjudication. But contemporary thinkers share important understandings about the basic elements of First Amendment history and theory, understandings that first appeared in Chafee's writings. These beliefs and assumptions constitute the essence of what is perceived as the American libertarian tradition.
Dewey, Addams, and Brandeis were the first representatives of an emerging civil libertarian tradition. They stressed the social interest in debate about matters of public importance and denigrated those purely personal benefits of self-expression that such earlier libertarians as Cooley, Burgess, and Schroeder had emphasized. More generally, the new generation of libertarians spoke of the ways in which free speech contributed to a democratic social life, a life infused by democratic social policies as well as democratic political procedures. While both civil and conservative libertarians claimed that democratic societies must protect expressive behavior, Dewey, Addams, and Brandeis contended that such associations also had to regulate economic activity to ensure that all citizens had the resources necessary to participate effectively in the public life of their communities. We always recommend starting your postgraduate personal statement by brainstorming ideas. Your notes should cover the following: Dont make a boneheaded mistake with your law school personal statement! Following the rules outlined above is just a start. Youll also need to read a few law school personal statements and pay attention to these specific features in the application process.
In Spies v. Illinois (1883), John Randolph Tucker asked the Court to reverse those earlier rulings. If the Court would not overrule precedent, he suggested that the justices at least recognize that those provisions in the first eight amendments "of a fundamental nature and of common law rights" could no longer be violated by state governments. Freedom of speech, Tucker maintained, was one such right. [68] As late as 1898, William Guthrie was still contending that previous judicial discussions of the privileges and immunities clause were mere obiter dicta,[69] without precedential value. [70] Early civil libertarians thought that several elements of unregulated industrial life threatened the functioning of democratic societies. In their view, modern industrial conditions created an economic dependence inconsistent with political freedom. Brandeis observed that a person cannot "be really free who is constantly in danger of becoming dependent for mere subsistence upon somebody and something else than his own exertion and conduct.
Alton B. Parker, the Cleveland Democrat who ran for president in 1904, was the first attorney who asked the Supreme Court to hold that a labor injunction violated the constitutional right of free speech. See Gompers v. Bucks Stove and Range Company, 221 U. S. 418, 430 (1911) (argument of the petitioner). While a judge in New York, Parker voted to uphold the New York maximum-hour law later invalidated by the Supreme Court in Lochner v. New York, but he endorsed the principles of economic substantive due process in his scholarly writings. See Parker (1914), pp. 631-32, 635-40. Parker became involved in the Gompers litigation as a result of his work with the National Civic Federation, a group of leading conservative industrialists who were seeking to compromise with less radical labor unions like the American Federation of Labor. Weinstein (1968), p. 16. Guthrie successfully argued Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 268 U. S. 510 (1925), before the Supreme Court. Although his brief primarily asserted that an Oregon law closing private schools violated the freedoms of contract and religion, Guthrie also claimed that the statute violated free-speech rights and quoted Justice Holmes's statement that the "ultimate good desired is best reached by free trade in ideas" in support of that point. Guthrie and Hershkopf (1925), p.
interferes with the title to one's property" courts must judge validity by reference to "those principles of civil liberty and constitutional protection which have become established in our system of laws, and not generally by rules that pertain to forms of procedure only. "[77] Cooley's definition of due process specifically pointed to both expressive and commercial activities as examples of rights encompassed by that phrase. "It would be absurd," he argued, "to say that arbitrary arrests were forbidden, but that the freedom of speech . . . The System of Freedom of Expression also briefly analyzed governmental regulation of campaign financing. Although Emerson's analysis was interesting and important, he again failed to explore seriously the constitutional relationships between free speech and private property. Emerson assumed that the First Amendment protected the right to purchase speech. "Funds expended for expression," he stated, had the same constitutional status as expression. For this reason, elected officials could rarely regulate campaign expenditures.
One searches his writings in vain for any expression of concern for diversity and participation, the values that inspired other progressive defenders of free speech. Instead, Holmes frequently insisted that virtuous citizens assisted the dominant forces of their community and did not take part in the formation of its goals. He claimed to be a committed proponent of "my country right or wrong. " In a speech before his old Civil War regiment, Holmes praised the soldier who would "throw away his life in obedience to a blindly accepted duty, in a cause he little understands, in a plan of campaign of which he has no notion, under tactics of which he does not see the use. "155 When asked to contribute to a Harvard Liberal Club meeting that was protesting censorship, Holmes did not deliver a ringing endorsement of the virtues of public debate. He merely noted that "with effervescing opinions, as with not yet forgotten champagnes, the quickest way to let them get fiat is to let them get exposed to air. "156 Brandeis established his national reputation in the fight for free speech in the workplace. "Rule by the people," he contended, "involves industrial democracy as well as political democracy. " Because "the greatest developer is responsibility," Brandeis insisted that the "aim" of working people should be "participation in responsibility for the conduct of business; and . .
"Under [Hughes's] leadership," he wrote, the "inspiring proclamations of this great Only prohibit present threats. In Northern Securities Co. v. United States, he declared that "not every act done in furtherance of an unlawful end is an attempt contrary to the law. There must be a certain nearness to the result. " Societies, he frequently asserted, could only punish "act[s] . . . done of which the natural and probable effect under the circumstances is the accomplishment of a substantive crime. " Thus, the law of criminal attempt, Holmes insisted, emphasized the dangerousness of a person's actions rather the moral value of the actor's motives. Deeds were evaluated "by their tendency under known circumstances and not by the actual intent that accompanies them. " Judges should look to a person's state of mind only when that person's actions were "not sufficient in themselves to produce a result which the law seeks to prevent. " In such cases, "an intent to bring it to pass" might be sufficient "to produce a dangerous probability that it will happen. " Law had no legitimate interest in persons who hoped to impede the achievement of communal goals but lacked the power to do Nowadays, the physical formatting of your personal statement matters less than ever because so much text is directly submitted through the web.
. the eventual assumption of full responsibilityas in cooperative enterprise. "86 For employees to realize these ambitions, their speech had to be effective as well as free. Brandeis argued that industrial democracy meant "not only a voice, but a vote,not merely a right to be heard, but a position through which labor may participate in management. "87 Governance of the workplace was another of Dewey's major themes. In his "Freedom of Thought and Work," he declared that "freedom There is, of course, considerable difference between maintaining that the Fourteenth Amendment protected free speech and broadly interpreting the scope of that protection. Significantly, in no free speech case decided between 1897 and 1925 did the Supreme Court ever support the merits of a free-speech claim. In Fox v. Washington, for example, the Court upheld the convictions of persons who had praised nudism and called for an end to prosecutions for indecent exposure.
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