A powerful indictment of contemporary attacks on free speech, this book argues for a vigorous First Amendment jurisprudence protecting even offensive types of speech. In recent years, political activists, academics, and legal specialists have attacked traditional notions of free speech protection as they concern hate speech, obscenity, and pornography. They have called for changes in Supreme Court doctrine in defining the First Amendment and have argued that the traditional view of free speech actually creates and perpetuates a society in which the weak--women, minorities, the poor--have...

In the 1970s, the Supreme Court directly ruled for the first time that commercial speech is protected by the free speech clause of the Constitution. The Court, however, did not grant it the full protection afforded to political and artistic speech. The SEC regulates a vast array of corporate speech that it considers to be a type of commercial speech. In this book, Professor Nicholas Wolfson examines the SEC's considerable powers in the control of corporate information and argues that the Court's distinction between political-artistic speech and corporate speech is erroneous.

Wolfson...

A powerful indictment of contemporary attacks on free speech, this book argues for a vigorous First Amendment jurisprudence protecting even offensive types of speech. In recent years, political activists, academics, and legal specialists have attacked traditional notions of free speech protection as they concern hate speech, obscenity, and pornography. They have called for changes in Supreme Court doctrine in defining the First Amendment and have argued that the traditional view of free speech actually creates and perpetuates a society in which the weak--women, minorities, the poor--have...