When Freedom Speaks: The Boundaries and the Boundlessness of Our First Amendment Right

by Lynn Greenky

Overview

This book makes first amendment issues immediate and contemporary.
 

When Freedom Speaks chronicles the stories behind our First Amendment right to speak our minds. Lynn Levine Greenky’s background as a lawyer, rhetorician, and teacher gives her a unique perspective on the protection we have from laws that abridge our right to the freedom of speech. Rhetoricians focus on language and how it influences perception and moves people to action. Powerfully employing that rhetorical approach, this book explores concepts related to free speech as moral narratives that proscribe the boundaries of our constitutionally protected right. Using the characters and drama embedded in legal cases that elucidate First Amendment principles, When Freedom Speaks makes the concepts easier to understand and clearly applicable to our lives. With a wide range of examples and accessible language, this book is the perfect overview of the First Amendment.

 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781684580934
Publisher:	Brandeis University Press
Publication date:	05/24/2022
Series:	Brandeis Series in Law and Society
Pages:	248
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Lynn Levine Greenky is teaching professor at Syracuse University in the Department of Communication and Rhetorical Studies. She started her career as an attorney admitted to the New York State Bar, and uses her legal training and expertise to teach presentation, advocacy, and argumentation.

Table of Contents

Introduction
Chapter One: A History Lesson
Chapter Two: Foundations and Building Blocks
Chapter Three: The Road to the Supreme Court
Chapter Four: Symbolically Speaking
Chapter Five: The Troubling Sound of Silence
Chapter Six: Politically Speaking
Chapter Seven: Warning! Dangerous Speech Ahead
Chapter Eight: Advocacy Vs Incitement?
Chapter Nine: Sticks and Stones and Words That Harm
Chapter Ten: What the #@*%! School Speech, Campus Codes, and Cancel Culture
Chapter Eleven: Public Spaces
Chapter Twelve: The Message and the Medium
Chapter Thirteen: When Speech Offends
Chapter Fourteen: The Language of Money
Chapter Fifteen: When Speech and Faith Collide
Conclusion
Table of Cases
Works Cited
Endnotes
Suggestions for Further Reading

Editorial Reviews

Lynn Greenky’s new book is a tour de force on the importance of free speech to all individuals and groups in America - right, left, center and anyone who doesn’t conform to the prevailing wisdom of the day. …Greenky reminds us that free speech means tolerating one another - instead of silencing or jailing one another. And that’s worth fighting for.

Jonathan Collegio

Lynn Greenky offers a spirited and engaging examination of the individuals, groups, and movements that have advanced free speech protections by standing up and speaking out. When Freedom Speaks is an accessible guide to the past, present, and future of free speech in the United States.

David Cole

Greenky is particularly attentive to the relationship between precedent, innovation, and power.

Communication and Democracy

04/01/2022

Greenky (communication and rhetorical studies, Syracuse Univ.) maps the history of the First Amendment's free speech clause from its foundation and building blocks to contemporary controversies. In 15 chapters, she lays out types of speech—protected and unprotected, symbolic, political, offensive, harmful, and hate—that have posed significant complications. She also considers problematic issues such as speech in public schools and other public places, the right to speak through silence, and both sides of the battle to speak, shout, protest, or counsel about abortion. Drawing on her training as a lawyer, Greenky locates notable inflection points and lays out the processes, patterns, and developments that have formed paradigms for U.S. Supreme Court decisions and doctrines. Her discussions of issues feature stories of the people whose contentions brought cases to court, as in the collision between free speech and free exercise of religion in the Supreme Court's 2018 Masterpiece Cakeshop decision and its 2010 campaign financing "money as speech" decision in Citizens United. VERDICT Complete with a glossary of legal terms, Greenky's easy-to-read primer offers general readers and students a telling history and framework for understanding the basic assumptions, ways of thinking, and methodologies courts commonly use to negotiate clashing and competing constitutional values and individual rights to free speech.—Thomas J. Davis

Library Journal

When Freedom Speaks serves as a reminder that the First Amendment is a living, breathing structure that continues to both challenge and reinforce our country’s definition of free speech. Lynn Greenky takes us on a thorough journey through all the trials and tribulations it has faced. Anyone with any opinion will benefit from reading this timely road map on the cornerstone of our Constitution.

Lauren Tousignant

"When Freedom Speaks by Lynn Greenky is an excellent introduction and exploration of the contentious field of First Amendment jurisprudence. Both entertaining and educational, it provides the knowledge necessary for an informed electorate. Like a good legal conundrum, it offers opportunities to ask important questions and spark lively arguments."

New York Journal of Books