Marketplace of Ideas, Part 2

I turned in my Media Law term paper on The Marketplace of Ideas, the Internet, and Campaign Finance Law yesterday, barely making sure all the pages had printed out before I slid the barely-held-together-by-a-staple behemoth under the Prof’s office door.

Here’s a suitable excerpt:

When Holmes wrote of the “free trade in ideas,” he transferred the beneficial properties of the free market to the standards of free expression enjoyed in the United States. Holmes expanded on this theory in his dissent in Gitlow v. New York (1925). Again, the Court ruled it to be constitutional to prohibit the publication of material advocating the overthrow of the government. Holmes’s dissent opposes the Court’s view that the literature in this case was an “incitement” that created an immediate danger. “Every idea is an incitement,” Holmes wrote. “It offers itself for belief and if believed it is acted on unless some other belief outweighs it or some failure of energy stifles the movement at its birth” (Gitlow v. New York, 1925). Holmes argues that citizens have the right to evaluate information and ideas for themselves. His dissents in these cases laid the groundwork for later decisions governing how much regulation the government is constitutionally permitted to enforce in each medium of communication.

I’m still catching up on sleep, but I do intend to post some sort of HTML-ized linked up version of the paper sometime in the not-too-distant future. I don’t know if it’s publication-worthy, but then again, I haven’t gotten around to rewriting last semester’s term paper for submission purposes, anyway, so maybe I should just put this sort of stuff off ’till I drop the big thesis bomb sometime next year.

Still to come, this week and this week only, about 15 pages on how American technology companies (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Cisco) help China filter the Internet, for my International Communications class. And I’m working on revisions to my briefs for the Law class. And two articles to start/finish for Online Journalism. And some web design for projects on Sandbox. And more.

12 days until vacation and counting…