Ms. Kagan's own paper trail consists of little but academic work, mostly on the First Amendment's speech and press clauses and on administrative law.
With some qualifications, therefore, the speech and press clauses may be analyzed under an umbrella "expression" standard, with little, if any, hazard of missing significant doctrinal differences.
An examination of the meaning of freedom of the press, tied to but not bound by various Supreme Court rulings on the scope and purpose of the First Amendment's speech and press clauses.
The Supreme Court's decisions interpreting the press clause have also said the institutional press has no special status.
The clauses of the amendment are often called the establishment clause, the free exercise clause, the free speech clause, the free press clause, the assembly clause, and the petition clause.
The First Amendment instructs Congress to "make no law... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press," but the Supreme Court historically has been reluctant to treat the press clause as meaningfully distinct from the speech clause.
"And a publisher that is a corporation could be prohibited from selling a book?" It was a hypothetical question, but it cut to the core of the meaning of the press clause of the First Amendment.
He was skeptical, as he wrote in The Hofstra Law Review in 1979, that the First Amendment's press clause ("Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press") gave the institutional press special protection, as Justice Potter Stewart had contended in an influential speech at Yale Law School in 1974.
It would be crazy, for example, to argue that for-profit corporations shouldn't be able to appeal adverse legal rulings simply because they turn a profit — or, similarly, to argue that for-profit media corporations deserve less protection under the Freedom of the Press Clause than their non-profit counterparts.
Debate in the House is unenlightening with regard to the meaning the Members ascribed to the speech and press clause, and there is no record of debate in the Senate.380 In the course of debate, Madison warned against the dangers that would arise "from discussing and proposing abstract propositions, of which the judgment may not be convinced.
The Press Clause of the First Amendment prohibits Congress from making any law that abridges the freedom of the press.
