Why Free Speech Is Not Enough
“Civil liberties once were radical.” So begins Laura Weinrib’s important revisionist history of the origins of American civil liberties, provocatively entitled The Taming of Free Speech: America’s Civil Liberties Compromise. In her account, the fight began in the early twentieth century as a radical struggle for workers’ rights and redistributive justice. The central claim was for a “right of agitation,” which its proponents believed predated the Constitution and afforded workers the right to engage in direct collective action to pressure employers for higher wages and better working conditions.
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