Absolutism and Democracy: Hugo L. Black’s Free Speech Jurisprudence

The speech struck some of America’s legal cognoscenti as quaintly naive, at best. The date was February 17, 1960. The speaker was US Supreme Court Justice Hugo Lafayette Black Jr., and the occasion was New York University School of Law’s James Madison Lecture. There were, Justice Black proclaimed to a packed hall, “absolutes” in the Bill of Rights, “put there by men who knew what words meant, and [who] meant their prohibitions to be absolutes.” This was especially the case, Black emphatically insisted, with the First Amendment. Its words were “plain” and “easily understood.” No law means no law.1