Source: http://uscivilliberties.org/themes/3136-application-of-first-amendment-to-states.html
Timestamp: 2019-04-20 00:15:06+00:00

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Those responsible for adding the Bill of Rights to the new federal constitution intended those amendments to act as limits on the national government only, a point illustrated as succinctly as possible by the opening words of the First Amendment: ‘‘Congress [emphasis added] shall make no law . . . .’’ Relying on the still recent history of the amendments’ framing and ratification, Chief Justice John Marshall in Barron v. Baltimore, 7 Pet. (32 U.S.) 243 (1833), confirmed that understanding by rejecting a claim that the Fifth Amendment’s prohibition on the taking of private property for public use without just compensation applied to state governments.
In 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment was added to the Constitution. Section 1 states (in part): ‘‘No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law . . .’’ The question of whether the amendment’s framers intended that one (or both) of these clauses would apply some or all of those first ten amendments to the states has been the subject of extensive scholarly and judicial commentary and controversy.
This incorporation debate (and the evolution of incorporation doctrine) need not be addressed here, except to note that, throughout the last decades of the nineteenth and early decades of the twentieth centuries, the Supreme Court read this language quite narrowly, stressing the importance of states’ following due process in criminal cases. Indeed, the first case interpreting the new amendment (the Slaughterhouse Cases, 16 Wall., 83 U.S., 36, in 1873) read the ‘‘privileges and immunities’’ clause so narrowly as to in effect read it out of the Constitution (at least until the end of the twentieth century).
With respect to the First Amendment, an important watershed was the case of Gitlow v. New York, 268 U.S. 652, in 1925. In this case the defendant was charged with violating that state’s Criminal Anarchy Act of 1902 by publishing several pamphlets that allegedly advocated the overthrow of New York’s government by unlawful means. When Gitlow’s appeal came before the Supreme Court, he argued that the New York law interfered with his freedom of speech, a ‘‘liberty’’ protected by the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment against state abridgment.
While no Supreme Court case has directly held that the right to petition is incorporated into the Fourteenth Amendment, the overwhelming implication of the Court’s reasoning in the cases thus far discussed must be that this right is also protected against state government infringement.
In 1934, in Hamilton v. Regents of the University of California, 293 U.S. 245 (1934), Justice Cardozo’s concurring opinion suggests that the Fourteenth Amendment’s due process clause undoubtedly includes certain religious liberties, but neither his nor the Court’s opinion specifically refers to the free exercise clause. Ultimately, very much like Benjamin Gitlow, Hamilton won the battle but lost the war. He argued that his religious conviction entitled him to an exemption from the University of California’s military training requirement, but the Court held that Hamilton was not compelled to attend the university. But if he did, he could be subject to the school’s rules and regulations.
In 1940, building on Hamilton v. Regents, the Court, in Cantwell v. Connecticut, 310 U.S. 296 (1940), actually found in favor of the individual’s claim of an infringement on free exercise. The Court held that Connecticut’s conviction of a Jehovah’s Witness for going door to door distributing religious literature was invalid. While the state may regulate the time, place, and manner of such solicitations, it could not forbid them entirely.
Would the Amendment’s ban on establishment of religion—the only component not yet incorporated— now be added to the list of fundamental liberties applicable to the states? The answer came in a 1947 case, Everson v. Board of Education, 330 U.S. 1 (1947). There, speaking through Justice Black, the Court invoked Thomas Jefferson’s ‘‘wall of separation between Church and State’’ and applied the ban on establishment of religion to state actions. At the same time, the Court decided that the wall had not been breached by the governmental action at issue in this case—New Jersey’s statute authorizing boards of education to reimburse parents, including those whose children attended religious schools, for the cost of bus transportation to and from school. The Court did not see the program as prohibited aid to a specific religious institution, but rather as a general program to help all parents get their children, regardless of religion, to and from their schools.
The First Amendment says nothing about ‘‘freedom of association,’’ but in NAACP v. Alabama, 357 U.S. 449 (1958), the Court said that such a right was so essential to the enjoyment of rights enumerated in the amendment that it is protected against state infringements. The case must be seen, as the Court did, against the background of the struggle for civil rights for African Americans. In an attempt to frustrate the activities of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) on behalf of civil rights, Alabama ordered the organization to produce a variety of its records, including its membership list. The NAACP claimed that publicizing the names of its members would inevitably lead to various reprisals, including possible violence, against those members. The Supreme Court held that the organization could assert the constitutional rights of its members, including most importantly the right to pursue lawful interests and to freely associate for the purpose of furthering such interests. The fine and contempt judgment against the NAACP by an Alabama trial court were overturned.
Abraham, Henry J. and Barbara A. Perry. Freedom and the Court, 8th ed. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003.
Curtis, Michael Kent. No State Shall Abridge: The 14th Amendment and the Bill of Rights. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1986.
———. Free Speech, ‘‘the People’s Darling Privilege’’: Struggles for Freedom of Expression in American History. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000.

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