ABSTRACT
If a sovereign, self-governing people were to make sensible judgments, they would need all the facts available on public issues—and all the competing views that followed. As to the political purpose of free expression, no modern advocate has been more eloquent than Alexander Meiklejohn, the philosophy professor and university president who believed self-government to be the unique and essential engine of American democracy. The press in its serious role as purveyor, analyst, and interpreter of news and information becomes an instrument of self-government. Sedition laws permitted government the power to prosecute free speech and a free press in general. The long journey of the First Amendment free-press clause from 1798 to New York Times v. Sullivan in 1964 was given fresh impetus by the Civil War but slowed again when World War I began its carnage. In the World War I years the Supreme Court replaced the Sedition Act with the Espionage Act.
