Sedition Laws Research Articles

Criminal Dissent: Prosecutions under the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798. By Wendell Bird (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 2020) 560 pp. $55.00

<i>Criminal Dissent: Prosecutions under the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798</i>. By Wendell Bird (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 2020) 560 pp. $55.00

The Law of Free Expression and New Information Technologies: The First Amendment Isn’t Obsolete

Recently the literature on free expression has turned to the question, Should the law of free expression be adjusted because of the availability of new information technologies (hereafter NIT), and if so, how? The only thing about NIT that distinguishes them from traditional media is that disseminating expression via NIT is much less expensive than doing so via traditional media. The tenor of recent scholarship on NIT and free expression is that the invention of NIT does support some modification of free expression law. This Essay argues that that conclusion might be correct, but that many of the arguments offered in support move much too quickly. The Essay tries to slow them down and in so doing to suggest that the arguments require complex and contestable judgments about exactly how an expansion of expression might elicit new rules regulating it. My goal is to identify the lines of analysis that need to be pursued before we conclude that the existing law of free expression should be modified in response to NIT. In that somewhat limited sense the Essay is contrarian. The Essay examines and critiques Professor Tim Wu’s prominent version of the argument that the development of NIT should lead us to rethink the law of free expression. After laying out the paradigm underlying free expression law, that speech causes harm, the Essay examines two aspects of the argument that the more speech, the more harm, which might lead us to seek a new set of rules that jointly optimize speech and harm. One is that NIT should lead us to alter substantive First Amendment law because NIT lead us to reconsider the general balance we have struck among the values promoted by free expression. Section IV deals with that argument. The second is that NIT affect the mechanisms by which specific categories of speech cause specific harms. That argument calls for a more granular approach. To implement that approach the Essay looks at the mechanisms by which more speech might render the “rules in place” no longer socially optimal. It examines false statements that injure reputation (libel), expression that induces unlawful action (the subject of the traditional law of sedition); sexually explicit expression (obscenity and pornography); false statements that inflict no material harm (“fake news”); and threats (cyberstalking). A final section turns to arguments about the platforms used by NIT – Twitter, Facebook, and the like. (1) The platforms should be subject to the same limitations on speech regulation that apply to the government. These arguments sound in the state-action doctrine rather than in the First Amendment, and I have relatively little to say about them. (2) The platforms can be regulated through the application of antitrust or fiduciary law without violating the First Amendment. I discuss existing First Amendment doctrine about the application of “general” laws to the media and examine some issues that might arise in connection with tinkering with antitrust or fiduciary law as the vehicle for platform regulation. (3) The platforms should be held liable for the utterances they disseminate, holding constant the substantive rules of libel, threats, and the like. The Essay’s overall theme is that the First Amendment rules in place probably already accommodate the concerns that motivate arguments for adjusting the law of free expression. The First Amendment, that is, is not obsolete.

Sedition Law and the Bloggers’ Freedom of Expression in Malaysia

The advancement of Information Technology has transformed the landscape of communication to the new medium of communication. Therefore, blog becomes one of the main communication mediums for a blogger in Malaysia. Bloggers write blog posts, share their likes and dislikes. They voice their opinions; provide suggestions, report news, and form groups in the Blogosphere. However, many bloggers were arrested and prosecuted in court under Sedition Law. This hinders the bloggers’ freedom of expression which is protected by Article 10(1) of the Federal Constitution of Malaysia. The objective of this article is to explore the impact of sedition law in the era of Information Technology for bloggers in practicing their freedom of expression in Malaysia. The qualitative research design has been adopted in analyzing three selected blogs and bloggers who were investigated and prosecuted in court. The authors submit that the Sedition Law does not override bloggers’ freedom of expression since the freedom itself is not originally absolute. This study will create awareness among bloggers on the importance of their blog information and the limitations of their freedom of expression.

The Kids Are All Right: The Law of Free Expression and New Information Technologies

Recently the literature on free expression has turned to the question, Should the law of free expression be adjusted because of the availability of new information technologies (hereafter NIT), and if so, how? The only thing about NIT that distinguishes them from traditional media is that disseminating expression via NIT is much less expensive than doing so via traditional media. The tenor of recent scholarship on NIT and free expression is that the invention of NIT does support some modification of free expression law. This Essay argues that that conclusion might be correct, but that many of the arguments offered in support move much too quickly. The Essay tries to slow them down and in so doing to suggest that the arguments require complex and contestable judgments about exactly how an expansion of expression might elicit new rules regulating it. My goal is to identify the lines of analysis that need to be pursued before we conclude that the existing law of free expression should be modified in response to NIT. In that somewhat limited sense the Essay is contrarian. The Essay examines and critiques Professor Tim Wu’s prominent version of the argument that the development of NIT should lead us to rethink the law of free expression. After laying out the paradigm underlying free expression law, that speech causes harm, the Essay examines two aspects of the argument that the more speech, the more harm, which might lead us to seek a new set of rules that jointly optimize speech and harm. One is that NIT should lead us to alter substantive First Amendment law because NIT lead us to reconsider the general balance we have struck among the values promoted by free expression. Section IV deals with that argument. The second is that NIT affect the mechanisms by which specific categories of speech cause specific harms. That argument calls for a more granular approach. To implement that approach the Essay looks at the mechanisms by which more speech might render the “rules in place” no longer socially optimal. It examines false statements that injure reputation (libel), expression that induces unlawful action (the subject of the traditional law of sedition); sexually explicit expression (obscenity and pornography); false statements that inflict no material harm (“fake news”); and threats (cyberstalking). A final section turns to arguments about the platforms used by NIT – Twitter, Facebook, and the like. (1) The platforms should be subject to the same limitations on speech regulation that apply to the government. These arguments sound in the state-action doctrine rather than in the First Amendment, and I have relatively little to say about them. (2) The platforms can be regulated through the application of antitrust or fiduciary law without violating the First Amendment. I discuss existing First Amendment doctrine about the application of “general” laws to the media and examine some issues that might arise in connection with tinkering with antitrust or fiduciary law as the vehicle for platform regulation. (3) The platforms should be held liable for the utterances they disseminate, holding constant the substantive rules of libel, threats, and the like. The Essay’s overall theme is that the First Amendment rules in place probably already accommodate the concerns that motivate arguments for adjusting the law of free expression. The First Amendment, that is, is not obsolete.

The Crime of Radical Industrial Unionism

A great deal of scholarship documents the history of antiradical repression in the United States. But this literature remains incomplete, particularly regarding the role of state laws and state authorities in undermining campaigns for radical industrial unionism in the first half of the Twentieth Century. This essay addresses this issue, describing how state-level sedition laws were used against the Industrial Workers of the World and communist unions, while also highlighting how progressive politicians and jurists joined with the capitalist sponsors of these laws and their conservative allies in government in promoting these efforts. While it avoids suggesting that such prosecutions were the only, or even primary, reasons for the demise of radical industrial unionism, this essay argues that the history of these laws must feature prominently in any attempt to understand this movement’s tragic fate and to comprehend the role of the state in labor history.

Our traditions teach tolerance; our philosophy preaches tolerance; our constitution practices tolerance; Let us not dilute it

Sedition law is being talked again. People are filing cases over cases and coming out on street to protest insisting that the accused be arrested immediately in the case of Amnesty International India. Another case has been booked against the Ramya, the ex-Parliamentarian, for making a statement with respect to Pakistan. These cases raise larger questions on free speech and expression in a democratic nation.

Implication of Shreya Singhal Judgment on Sedition Law

Implication of Shreya Singhal Judgment on Sedition Law

Daniel G. Donalson. The Espionage and Sedition Acts of World War I: Using Wartime Loyalty Laws for Revenge and Profit.

The notion that the draconian sedition laws of World War I were used by individuals to exact revenge or extract profit at the expense of unfortunate victims is a commonsense conclusion. Plenty of other punitive laws in American history, dating back to at least the Alien and Sedition Acts and forward to at least the Patriot Act, have provided the same pretext for those bent on personal gain of one sort or another. It is a truism that criminal and civil law are routinely abused in multiple ways for personal reasons. U.S. laws and procedures have this possibility “baked into” them, to use a modern idiom. That is why safeguards exist, whether it is the threat of prosecution for perjury or the elaborate rules of testimonial evidence. Still, when the justice system is stressed to the breaking point, or passions are aroused, not even these safeguards are enough. Daniel G. Donalson's thesis is not that personal perversion of these laws for the sake of retribution was unique, but rather that the widespread practice of abuse (encouraged by the laws themselves), the legal machinery charged with enforcing it, the Wilson administration's zeal to stifle dissent, and the insidious climate of fear and hysteria combined to spawn “ a serious threat not only to individual freedom but Constitutional liberties for all Americans” (p. 26).

Emergency Provisions in the Indian Constitution: A Study of the 'Internal Disturbance' of 1975

The Indian Constitution is not only the most comprehensive of all but is also paramount in the hands of the executive with respect to a plethora of powers enshrined in its text. Though this is not much prevalent of-late but a remarkable evidence of the superiority of the executive was witnessed in 1975 when a national emergency was proclaimed by the President of India on recommendation of Ms. Indira Nehru Gandhi who was holding the office of Prime Minister at that time. The basis of the proclamation was internal disturbance and the two year period for which the emergency was in force saw innocent Indian citizens being jailed by draconian sedition laws. Even the Apex Court of the country could do nothing as the Executive had withdrawn all the fundamental rights for the time being. The non-existence of the intrinsic 'right to life and personal liberty' was shameful for the Indian judiciary and it failed to protect the citizens from unlawful detentions. This paper examines the causes which led to the proclamation of 1975 and checks its validity. It also lists the consequences of the same.

Commonsense anticommunism: labor and civil liberties between the world wars

Between the Great War and Pearl Harbor, conservative labor leaders declared themselves America's first line of defense against Communism. In this surprising account, Jennifer Luff shows how the American Federation of Labor fanned popular anticommunism but defended Communists' civil liberties in the aftermath of the 1919 Red Scare. The AFL's commonsense anticommunism, she argues, steered a middle course between the American Legion and the ACLU, helping to check campaigns for federal sedition laws. But in the 1930s, frustration with the New Dealorder led labor conservatives to redbait the Roosevelt administration and liberal unionists and abandon their reluctant civil libertarianism for red scare politics. That frustration contributed to the legal architecture of federal anticommunism that culminated with the McCarthyist fervor of the 1950s.Relying on untapped archival sources, Luff reveals how labor conservatives and the emerging civil liberties movement debated the proper role of the state in policing radicals and grappled with the challenges to the existing political order posed by Communist organizers. Surprising conclusions about familiar figures, like J. Edgar Hoover, and unfamiliar episodes, like a German plot to disrupt American munitions manufacture, make Luff's story a fresh retelling of the interwar years.

Silence in the Courtroom

Concentrating on the trials of Thomas Cooper in 1800 and Eugene Debs in 1918, this article looks at how sedition laws and other legal restrictions on free speech result in courtroom trials that produce a counteractive effect. Each of these people contravened and challenged existing censorship laws designed to subdue government criticism. The resulting show trials gave voice to the individuals and causes that democratic governments attempted to stifle. This article explores the evolving legal response to the irony of how a democracy, as a government where all voices are given input, creates a legal framework to legitimize the suppression of these voices.

Legal Liberalism, Statutory Despotism and State Power in Early Twentieth-Century South Africa

This article is about the attempts by pre- and post-Union (1910) South African governments to create effective sedition laws, partly directly to curb specific political opponents, but also to license and focus state intelligence-gathering activities. Supreme Court judges' adherence to a rule-of-law formalism in a succession of court cases both hindered and encouraged these attempts. I am particularly interested in how the courts' imposition of more rigorous standards of performance in the production of evidence eventually exceeded the state's bureaucratic capability and undermined officials' confidence in the instrumental value of the rule of law, leading administrators to enact legislation to suppress their political adversaries without reference to the courts. The judges' stance in this history was not one of progressive or sudden capitulation to the lawmakers' and executive's will, as is sometimes argued, but notably consistent throughout.

Savarkar (1883–1966), Sedition and Surveillance: the rule of law in a colonial situation

In March 1910, after two years of sustained surveillance by the colonial government, a young Indian revolutionary nationalist, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar (1883–1966), was arrested in London and extradited to India for trial. Among the charges he faced was the curious one of sedition. Using Savarkar as the starting point – and concluding with Gandhi's own encounter with sedition – this essay argues that sedition law had a critical, and extended, life in the colonial context, allowing the use of what were seen as dangerous words to be evidence of conspiracy long after the metropole had abandoned the practice. The colonial state's response to revolutionary nationalism gave rise to two principal colonial weapons against anti-colonial nationalism (whether manifested in Savarkar's call for armed rebellion or Gandhian nonviolent noncooperation). The first weapon was surveillance, a developing technology of state control that placed an increasingly large number of young ‘revolutionaries’ under systematic monitoring. They were placed under surveillance to monitor not just what they were doing, but also what they were thinking, writing, and speaking. The second and perhaps more important weapon of the colonial state in India was sedition law. While sedition had a long history in Britain, the modern history of sedition was in fact inextricably linked to colonial rule. The history of colonial surveillance and the development of sedition law strongly suggests that the real danger posed by all nationalists, revolutionary and otherwise, lay in a violence that was far more rhetorical and symbolic than physical, for what was really at stake was the fundamental legitimacy of colonial rule.

Can Saying Something Make It So? The Nature Of Seditious Harm

In this paper, I redress an analytic deficit in debates about sedition by providing an explanatorily account of the relation between speech and action using speech act theory as developed by J.L. Austin. The specific focus will be on speech acts advocating violence against the state, in the form of religious sermons preaching violent jihad or glorifying acts of terrorism. This philosophical account will have legal consequences for how we classify speech acts deemed to be dangerous, or to cause harm. It also suggests that because speech can constitute action or conduct in certain circumstances, sedition laws, in principle, might be defensible, but not in their current form.

"A Fabricated Perjury": The [Mis]Trial of William Blake

On 11 January 1804, the poet, printmaker, and artist William Blake was tried at the Chichester quarter sessions for sedition. This article situates Rex v. Blake in an accurate legal and historical context to test Blake's claim that the charges against him were a Fabricated Perjury? The use of the quarter sessions reveals that the local justices of the peace misinterpreted the legislation governing the offenses that were used to try Blake. This suggests that the Sussex authorities were prepared to misuse the law of sedition in order to set an example for the local populace as Britain mustered her defenses for the expected landing of Napoleon's Imperial Army.

Deportation nation: outsiders in American history

The danger of deportation hangs over the head of virtually every non-citizen in the United States. In the complexities and inconsistencies of immigration law, one can find a reason to deport almost any noncitizen at almost any time. In recent years, the system has been used with unprecedented vigour against millions of deportees. We are a nation of immigrants - but which ones do we want, and what do we do with those that we don't? These questions have troubled American law and politics since colonial times. Deportation Nation is a chilling history of communal self-idealization and self-protection. The post-Revolutionary Alien and Sedition Laws, the Fugitive Slave laws, the Indian removals, the Chinese Exclusion Act, the Palmer Raids, the internment of the Japanese Americans - all sought to remove those whose origins suggested they could never become true Americans. And for more than a century, millions of Mexicans have conveniently served as cheap labour, crossing a border that was not official until the early 20th century and being sent back across it when they became a burden. By illuminating the shadowy corners of American history, Daniel Kanstroom shows that deportation has long been a legal tool to control immigrants' lives and is used with increasing crudeness in a globalised but xenophobic world.

Sedition and the Question of Freedom of Speech

Since September 11 2001, the Australian Federal Government has passed different legislations designed to fight terrorism which includes expansion of laws that target sedition. This law of sedition prohibits speech or writing that is intended to lead to violent conduct and it presents limitations and prohibitions against the rights of freedom of speech.

‘The roof is on fire’: The academic writer and social critique

Paris is burning. They riot in the streets. My daughter tells me she has begun work on a documentary critiquing the government’s new sedition laws - we both know the danger. Would they dare arrest the film makers? The phones are playing up - too many noises, clunks, echoes, static: are they being bugged, again? This is Australia. This is 2005…

'Modernising' the Crime of Sedition?

Australia has a revised national law of sedition and the amendments were modernizing the language of the provisions of the Crimes Act 1914. They were not a wholesale revision of that Act's /sedition offences. In a rare display of bipartisan dissent, the Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee unanimously recommended that Schedule 7 be omitted from the Anti-Terrorism Bill.

Going, Going, Gone! Implications of the Repeal of Criminal Libel and Sedition Laws in Ghana

Going, Going, Gone! Implications of the Repeal of Criminal Libel and Sedition Laws in Ghana