Source: https://www.law.nyu.edu/news/ideas/Burt-Neuborne-Madisons-Music
Timestamp: 2019-04-24 06:44:15+00:00

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Given Burt Neuborne’s half century of civil liberties work, which has established him as one of the most accomplished lawyers in that field, it’s hard to imagine he would have much more to learn about the First Amendment. But in his new book, Madison’s Music: On Reading the First Amendment, Neuborne, Norman Dorsen Professor of Civil Liberties, renders an analysis of the amendment that he says has never been offered before, 225 years after its drafting by James Madison.
It’s not that any of Madison’s six textual ideas in the First Amendment were unique, Neuborne adds; they were all present in one or another of our previous rights-bearing texts. Madison’s greatest accomplishment, he says, was in knowing what ideas to include and, most important, arranging them in a chronological narrative of democracy in action. The same remarkably disciplined organization is found not just in the structure of the First Amendment itself, but also in the narrative that emerges from the ordering of the remaining nine amendments in the Bill of Rights.
“Madison was the only one to see the way this thing fit together,” says Neuborne. “You read the First Amendment as a story, as a poem. And if you look at the rest of the Bill of Rights vertically, it’s the same thing. The First sets out the ideal ‘city on a hill,’ and the rest of the Bill of the Rights asks how we protect this precious thing” by listing the threats in order of dangerousness and providing careful structural protections against each hazard.
Video: What would James Madison say to today's Supreme Court?
Neuborne wrote the book to address what he sees as contemporary perversion of the First Amendment’s true purpose. He is particularly troubled by the originalist approach to constitutional law taken by judges such as Antonin Scalia. Such a stance, the author argues, fails to see the forest for the trees.
After all, he adds, the Founders were as divided at the beginning as we are now: “There wasn’t some huge consensus about what the First Amendment meant. It turns out that as to anything that’s important—the First Amendment, the Fourth Amendment, the Fifth Amendment—the language can bear multiple meanings, and the people were divided.” Thus, in Neuborne’s version of constitutional interpretation, the overall order and organization of the Bill of Rights—Madison’s “music”—becomes crucial.
The real impetus for writing the book came from a series of First Amendment decisions from the Supreme Court between 2010 and 2012 that troubled Neuborne greatly. United States v. Stevens found that a film producer could sell gruesome videos of dog fighting; Snyder v. Phelps gave Fred Phelps and his notorious Westboro Baptist Church a green light to picket military funerals in an inflammatory manner; Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association overturned a ban on selling violent video games to children; and United States v. Alvarez voided a federal law criminalizing false claims of winning military medals.
Burt Neuborne (left) with Norman Dorsen on the occasion of Neuborne's inaugural lecture as Norman Dorsen Professor of Civil Liberties on February 17. The lecture's subject was how to hear Madison's music in the Bill of Rights.
The essential issue, he says, is that the Court concentrates on the first three clauses of the First Amendment protecting speakers while ignoring the three that protect the rights of hearers. Two major cases in point: Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission and McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, which Neuborne and many others believe have tipped the political scales dramatically in favor of well-heeled special interests at the expense of ordinary citizens.
Another major dilemma, to Neuborne, is the Court’s approach to the amendment’s religion clauses. While common wisdom points to a tension between the establishment clause and the free exercise clause, Neuborne disagrees.

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