Our Democratic First Amendment

Ashutosh Bhagwat is Martin Luther King, Jr Professor of Law and the Boochever and Bird Endowed Chair for the Study and Teaching of Freedom and Equality at the University of California, Davis School of Law. He has clerked for Judge Richard Posner of the Seventh Circuit and Judge Anthony Kennedy of the United States Supreme Court. He is the author of The Myth of Rights (2010), as well as numerous articles on a variety of legal subjects. Professor Bhagwat is a member of the American Law Institute.

'By highlighting the First Amendment's too often neglected press, assembly, and petition clauses, Bhagwat shows how the democratic free speech tradition most closely associated with Louis Brandeis complements rather than contradicts the broadly libertarian understanding that finally emerged following the McCarthy era. Eschewing censorship, Bhagwat would turn to what Tocqueville identified as America's distinctive democratic strength - civil society institutions - to tackle our age's pathologies of information silos, Internet trolls, and fake news. Our Democratic First Amendment is at once clear-eyed and boldly free of cynicism.' Michael C. Dorf, Robert S. Stevens Professor of Law, Cornell University

• Introduction; Part I. The Framers' Democrocratic First Amendment: 1. Freedom of speech and of the press; 2. Assembly and association; 3. The petition clause; 4. Cognate rights and democratic citizenship; Part II. The Democratic First Amendment in the Age of Twitter: 5. Cacophony: speech and press in the Internet era; 6. DeSiloing: of civic associations, book clubs, and taverns; 7. Why assembly and petition still matter; Conclusion.