ABSTRACT
It is not customary to regard judges as statesmen, but the unique powers of the Supreme Court of the United States make it easier for an American judge to gain this distinction. In a very real sense the task of expounding the Constitution converts the Supreme Court justice into a lawgiver, because to expound the meaning of the powers granted, the limits imposed, and the relations established by this document is to give the nation the law by which it lives. The American government was constituted in order to secure the rights that all men, by nature, possess equally, and to do this with, and only with, the consent of the governed. The possibility of democratic misrule was not overlooked by the authors of the Constitution. It was of course World War I and its aftermath that first required the Supreme Court to expound the meaning of the constitutional rights of free speech and press.
