11/6/2023

Last week’s curation at RealClear’s American Civics portal leads off with Carson Holloway’s critique of New York Times v. Sullivan, the landmark Supreme Court decision on free speech, at Law & Liberty. Holloway argues that because the opinion is bad constitutional law and bad public policy, the Court should revisit it in a future case and overturn the decision. On the policy front, he says it “gives the press near-immunity from libel suits brought by public figures and therefore near-impunity to traffic in false and defamatory claims about them.” On a deeper level, Holloway contends that the decision “undermines…the protection of the natural rights of the individual” by neglecting to protect the right of keeping the status of one’s reputation, which the American founders thought was “a fundamental right.” Holloway makes the case that any victim of “defamation should have as much right to sue for recovery of damages as the victim of fraud or breach of contract.” And he says that any novelties in constitutional law “must be judged against the teaching on rights that informed our nation’s Founding.” Quite simply: “Our traditions should protect and transmit, not undermine, the fundamental character of our rights-respecting regime.”

At Public Discourse, Paul Krause argues that a new book, “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness: Britain and the American Dream,” by historian Peter Moore uncovers “the roots of America’s political credo” by “taking a close look at pre-Declaration history.” Krause describes “the revolutionary generation" that "unleashed a spirit of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” But this revolution did not start with the founding era. Instead, it was “a force that had been building” for centuries by-way-of thinkers and writers like John Locke and Samuel Johnson. In America, Krause writes that it was “a handful of enterprising individuals, like Franklin, who, through sheer force of will and foresight...advanced the cause that spread to many.” As Moore argues, “it was a bottom-up movement, not a top-down political imposition.”