ABSTRACT
The opinion for the court of appeals was by Judge Learned Hand, one of the most respected and distinguished jurists of our time—a man of profound culture and scholarship, with wide interests and humane instincts. The defendants were engaged in a concerted effort to teach the doctrines of Marxism-Leninism. Justice Frankfurter said that it is important constitutionally that the democratic processes be kept unimpaired and unrestricted. But he believed that the Smith Act, as applied in the Dennis case, had a silencing, repressive effect, for reformers will not speak for fear of being mistaken for revolutionaries. In the Dennis case Frankfurter was following the line he took in the majority opinion in the Gobitis case and in the minority opinion in the Barnette case. Much of the trouble flows from the fact that Justice Frankfurter's mind in such cases works along legislative rather than judicial lines.
