No medium has a richer historical pedigree in the free speech context than print. The English practice of licensing printing presses, and subsequent critiques of this practice, helped shape the development of the rights of free speech and press in the First Amendment.1 The Supreme Court has decided cases relating to the freedom of printed expression for hundreds of years, though the Court generally did not analyze issues through a First Amendment lens until the 20th century.2 The Court’s contemporary free speech jurisprudence developed in large part through cases involving print media, and accordingly the Court has never addressed the medium’s “unique characteristics” in the same way it has addressed other media.3

Footnotes

1

See June 1643: An Ordinance for the Regulating of Printing, Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, 1642-1660 184–86 (C. H. Firth & R.S. Rait eds., 1911); 4 William Blackstone, Commentaries *150. See generally Grosjean v. Am. Press Co., 297 U.S. 233, 245–49 (1936) (describing the legal landscape for press prior to and leading up to the adoption of the First Amendment).

2

See, e.g., United States v. Hudson & Goodwin, 11 U.S. (7 Cranch) 32 (1812) (holding that United States courts would not recognize a common law claim for seditious libel, though reaching this conclusion without reference to the First Amendment); cf. Gitlow v. New York, 268 U.S. 652, 666 (1925) (first incorporating the freedoms of speech and press against the states through the Fourteenth Amendment).

3

See, e.g., Taxation and Financial Regulation of Media (discussing development of First Amendment jurisprudence of financial regulation based on regulations applied to periodicals); Miami Herald Publ’g Co. v. Tornillo, 418 U.S. 241 (1974) (developing free speech principle that government may not compel speaker to provide a forum for views other than its own); N.Y. Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254 (1964) (developing free speech principles relating to defamation of public figures). See generally

Prior Restraints on Speech

, >https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/amdt1-7-2-3/ALDE_00013540; Overview of Compelled Speech, >https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/amdt1-7-12-1/ALDE_00000769/.