The Incoherence of Antonin Scalia
Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts
By Antonin Scalia and Bryan A. Garner
(Thomson/West, 567 pp., $49.95)
"According to William Blackstone, whom Scalia and Garner treat as an authority on American law at the time of the Constitution, freedom of speech forbids censorship in the sense of prohibiting speech in advance, but does not prohibit punishment after the fact of speech determined by a jury to be blasphemous, obscene, or seditious. And so an understanding of free speech that embraces flag burning is exceedingly unoriginalist. It is the product of freewheeling Supreme Court decisions within the last century."
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