So too at JNU: Whatever the student protesters actually said, and no matter how “disloyal” or “abusive” it was, it was in the realm of ideas and speech, and nobody has even suggested that they engaged in violent action. First, however strongly Debs had urged the case against the war, he was not obstructing recruitment he was influencing people by ideas alone. He made three arguments, all of which are applicable to the JNU case. And, in 1919, he spoke up on behalf of Debs.įreund’s article, “The Debs Case and the Freedom of Speech”, quickly became a classic, ultimately leading US law to shift ground, so that now it is universally agreed that even disloyal and seditious speech, and even during wartime, is protected under the First Amendment - unless there is a direct and imminent incitement to specific acts of violence.
He insisted that a law school should be not a place where young lawyers learn traditional doctrine but, instead, a place where they learn to think critically, challenging the social order: Thus philosophy, economics and sociology would be part of their legal education. He wrote extensively about abuses of police power and opposed the mass deportations of immigrants that had been proposed (then as now!). Ernst Freund, a German Jewish professor of political science and law, and the chief architect of the University of Chicago Law School, had long been a troublemaker. The US Supreme Court upheld Debs’s conviction, but a dissenting intellectual, and a foreigner at that, spoke up alone.
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Meanwhile, however, the case changed the face of free speech law.
Debs went to jail, where he soon contracted tuberculosis, from which he died several years later (after his sentence was commuted in 1920). Debs did not physically obstruct military recruitment or registration, but the prosecutors reasoned that his speech was a form of obstruction and as such violated the act. Eugene Debs, famous labour leader and five-time Socialist Party candidate for president, was convicted of violating a similar earlier law by speaking up with strong denunciation of the war, which he said was a bosses’ war and injurious to the working classes. In 1918, towards the end of World War I, the US Congress passed the Sedition Act, which set harsh criminal penalties for anyone who uses “disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language” about the US government, flag or war effort. It seems useful, at this point, to gain some historical distance, looking at a case far away in place and time. Much has been written about India’s vacillation between Tagorean/ Gandhian protection for speech and fearful support for legislation against speech. No less a liberal than Ramachandra Guha describes what was said at JNU as “a provocation where perhaps the freedom of speech limit has been crossed” - even though he quickly criticised the arrests, and even though nobody should claim to have an accurate idea of what was said, given the evidence that recordings have been doctored.
Despite widespread protest of the government’s actions in arresting the dissenting students, notable figures, not just on the right, have spoken in favour of drawing some line and terming some speech too dangerous to permit. The recent events at JNU show that dissent has dangerously lost ground. Throughout the nation’s history, parties across the political spectrum have tried to suppress allegedly dangerous speech with a variety of laws against sedition and religious offence. The freedom of speech never has an easy road in any democracy, and it has not had one in India.