Free Expression and Democracy in America: A History. By Stephen M. Feldman. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. x, 585 pp. $55.00, ISBN 978-0-226-24066-4.)

Abstract

After decades of First Amendment scholarship that has emphasized discreet periods, problems, or doctrines, there is finally a book that attempts to cover the entire First Amendment throughout American history. Stephen M. Feldman integrates First Amendment jurisprudence into a larger fabric of judicial review in Freedom of Expression and Democracy in America. In doing so, Feldman emphasizes the changing conception of American democracy as it relates to the simultaneous and contradictory traditions of suppression and dissent. In his apt line: “Dissent begets suppression which begets dissent” (p. 152). Feldman is a law professor, but contrary to what one might assume, his book is not celebratory of the First Amendment tradition; it is instead, as its subtitle asserts, a history. Feldman has thorough knowledge of the relevant secondary sources and a complete grasp of not only the Supreme Court's free expression decisions, especially the more important ones (only Bond v. Floyd [1966] is missing), but also free speech fights that ended in state courts or (in the nineteenth century) never reached a court at all.