Make No Law

"The single most surprising fact in Lewis' book, however, is that the court did not refer to the amendment in considering a free-speech case until 1919--for the simple reason that after the Sedition Act expired in 1801, the federal government did not try to limit those freedoms again until the outbreak of World War I, when U.S. citizens were prosecuted under the Espionage Act of 1917 for criticizing the draft. In the first three of those cases, the high court upheld convictions obtained under the act; it was only in a dissent by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. in a fourth case, Abrams vs. United States, that the 1st Amendment was invoked in defense of leafleting that had resulted in conviction.
"Not until 1931 did the court's majority finally apply the 1st Amendment, in this instance to strike down a California law that criminalized the display of a red flag 'as a sign, symbol or emblem of opposition to organized government.'"

Jonathan Kirsch reviews Anthony Lewis's Freedom for the Thought That We Hate, A Biography of the First Amendment in the Los Angeles Times.