LH24-P THE FIRST AMENDMENT

The First Amendment is just one sentence of the U.S. Constitution, but it has produced a library’s worth of analysis. It contains six separate rights, each of which presents legal and policy issues that few judges or lawyers have mastered. Yet it is also one of the most accessible provisions in the Constitution – almost everyone understands that speech and religion are to be “free.” The first session will introduce the First Amendment and then address several contemporary speech problems. The second session will focus on the two religious clauses of the First Amendment, addressing problems that show that people can be in agreement about the meaning of the clauses, and still in strong disagreement about results in individual cases.