Court Opinion

ID: 9575413
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 21:13:34.853136+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T12:48:10.581572
License: Public Domain

WILLIAM A. BABLITCH, J.
{concurring in part, dissenting in part). Some fifty years after the adoption of the Bill of Rights to the United States Constitution, *542citizens of Wisconsin gathered in Madison to draft a constitution. The framers had before them the language of the first amendment to the United States Constitution: "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech....” The framers were asked to consider nearly identical language for the Wisconsin Constitution: "The legislature shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech....” This language limiting the protection of free speech only to governmental action was rejected as being "too indefinite.” M. Quaife, The Convention of 1846 at 365 (1919). The majority today reinserts what the framers specifically considered and rejected, and then in all seriousness accuses those who disagree with them of rewriting the constitution.
The majority opinion goes far beyond what is necessary to protect private property rights, thereby greatly limiting Wisconsin citizens’ rights of free speech. I join with Justice Abrahamson’s conclusion that the Wisconsin Constitution protects the reasonable exercise of political speech in a nongovernmental public forum. That the Wisconsin Constitution can be interpreted so as to protect both private property interests as well as individual freedom of expression is amply demonstrated in the majority opinion of the court of appeals. The court of appeals enjoined the Nu Parable performance, a conclusion with which I agree.
I write to emphasize that fifty years of experience taught a lesson that was not ignored by the framers of the Wisconsin Constitution: that government was not the only entity that can substantially infringe on individual liberties. Accumulations of economic power by nongovernmental entities can, by the use of that power, pose as great a threat to individual liberty as can government. Their concern with the power of *543banks, corporations, and railroads is amply documented in historical treatises, see Robert C. Nesbit, Wisconsin A History, (1973), Alice E. Smith, History of Wisconsin Vol. 1 (1973), accounts of the convention debates, see Brown, The Making of the Wisconsin Constitution, Part 1, 1949 Wis. L. Rev. 648, Brown, The Making of the Wisconsin Constitution, Part II, 1952 Wis. L. Rev. 23; Quaife, supra at 365, and the document itself. Wisconsin Const, art. I, sec. 12; art. I, sec. 17, art. XI, sec. 1; art. XI, sec. 4 (Repealed 1902); art. XIII, sec. 11.
I am authorized to state that CHIEF JUSTICE NATHAN HEFFERNAN joins in this dissent.