Most Americans assume that free speech and associated First Amendment guarantees mean that the government cannot punish blasphemy. And many people assume that this has always been the case: that when the First Amendment was ratified, it was meant to prevent the government from enacting anti-blasphemy laws. I argue that the founding generation took a quite different view. For founding-era Americans, prosecuting blasphemy was fundamentally compatible with free speech and religious liberty. A close examination of primary evidence from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries shows that blasphemy was unprotected speech, like obscenity or libel, and could be punished as such. Originalists -- champions of the Constitution's original meaning -- need to take this evidence into account in explaining what the Constitution means today.
Tyler Dobbs
Harvard Law School
Tyler Dobbs is a third-year student at Harvard Law School. A 2016 graduate of Harvard College, where he founded the John Adams Debate Society, Tyler received a master's degree in Classics from Merton College, Oxford in 2017. At HLS, Tyler serves as an editor of the Harvard Law Review and as Vice President of Education and Outreach of the Harvard Federalist Society. After graduating from law school, Tyler will spend a year clerking on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit before entering private practice in Washington, D.C.
Thursday, October 14th, 4:00pm
Harvard College’s Fong Auditorium, Boylston 110