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How Did Holmes Respond To The Trial Of Jacob Abrams

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Abrams was a case under the repressive Espionage and Sedition Acts passed during World War I, the most outrageously unconstitutional violations of our civil liberties since the 1798 Alien and Sedition Acts. The 1917-18 laws prohibited anything — including speech — that criticized the government, brought it into disrepute, and supposedly interfered with our war effort. The Supreme Court consistently upheld this legislation. In 1918, Jacob Abrams and several other Russian immigrants threw down some leaflets from the roof of a loft in Manhattan’s garment district. The leaflets did not oppose the war with Germany. They opposed American intervention in the Russian Revolution and, toward that end, urged workers not to produce arms for that purpose. The government claimed, however, that the war effort against Germany would thereby be hampered. After a trial before a hostile judge, Abrams and his co-defendants were convicted, and he was sentenced to twenty years in prison. (In 1921, while Warren Harding was president, the government commuted the sentences and deported the defendants to Russia.) Holmes Speaks Amid lingering war-time hysteria and fear of Bolshevism, the Supreme Court affirmed the convictions over the immortal dissent of Holmes. In what amounted to an eloquent essay, Holmes dispatched the majority’s decision, …show more content…

“That,” referring to his preceding sentence, “at any rate, is the theory of our Constitution. It is an experiment, as all life is an experiment.” Then he slightly reformulates the “clear and present danger” test he had recently devised as the appropriate legal test. “We should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe and believe to be fraught with death, unless they so imminently threaten immediate interference with the lawful and pressing purposes of the law that an immediate check is required to save the

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Congress approved their right to prevent circumstances that could cause harm during a disturbance of danger, making the famous line “clear and present danger”, a question of proximity and degree, while also exhibiting how one’s speech can cause harm by disregarding the bounds of one’s free speech protection. However, Justice Holmes believed that Schenck did not violate the first amendment. Under various other circumstances Schenck’s actions would have been fine but the court responded with, “The character of every act depends upon the circumstances in which it is done,” acknowledging the first amendment gives people the right to freedom of speech but has certain boundaries about what exactly you are allowed to express. The supreme court believed Schenck was causing harm to the government because the United States was at war. The government saw it as interference and a threat to the status quo of soldiers being drafted and sent to war.

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