First Amendment – LAWYERS & LIQUOR

Boozy’s Legal Funhouse -Episode 10: John Adams Hates Free Speech

Good morning and welcome back! I’m the Boozy Barrister, and after a brief hiatus last week because I literally fell down a flight of stairs we’re back with another Episode of Boozy’s Legal Funhouse!

This week we’re having a discussion of Shakespearian Mock Trials, Judges arrested for child pornography, the inability of a victim to identify her murderer from beyond the grave, and then discussing everyone’s favorite amendment – the First Amendment – and why it pissed off John Adams enough that he made criticism of his government a federal crime!

Feel free to give it a listen here or on your favorite podcasting service, or don’t. I’m not your father.

Recorded 3/29/2021

Support the Legal Funhouse on Patreon! here.

Fundamental Friday: You Don’t Have A Constitutional Right To Infect.

[Note: If you’re new here, possibly from a thing I did a couple days ago, rest assured that this is one of those boring lawyer posts where I talk down to people in a condescending manner about a topic. You should recognize it. In fact, I know you do because I’ve reviewed a lot of your firm “blogs” and am well aware each and every one of you think talking to people like they’ve suffered some form of traumatic brain injury is the way you need to speak to potential clients. It’s cool. I get it. You’re an asshole. Anyhow, this one’s more for the laymen, layladies, and lay-people-of-no-or-any-gender, so sit back and enjoy a really long diatribe.]

Welcome to Lawyers & Liquor, a site that’s updated about as often as my invoices are being paid these days. I’m your host, the Boozy Barrister, and this month we’re going to open with something a little different from our typical Free Speech Friday to take a brief foray into the world of constitutional rights and legitimate exercises of the state’s police powers in a time of turmoil. You know, like a worldwide pandemic and a nation that has essentially stuck up a sign that says “Be Back Soon” on the sliding plexiglass door that is our borders. But before we get into all of that fun stuff, please allow me to take a moment and direct you to the list of the Lawyers & Liquor Patreon supporters who provide financial backing for all of the idiotic stuff we do here.

We all on the same page here? Good, now gather around because I want to be exceedingly clear in this time of turmoil:

You do not have a constitutional right to be a complete jackass and infect those around you, and the government absolutely has the precedential ability to restrict you from doing so. And today, Typhoid Dipshit, I’m going to go into why.

Quack Quack Honk Designs Presents Free Speech Friday: John Adams Hated Bad Press.

Welcome to the second in an installment series here on Lawyers & Liquor where I, the bloviating blowhard that is the Boozy Barrister, become your cut rate Ms. Frizzle as we go on a magical journey of learning together about the First Amendment and, more specifically, the freedom of speech that it guarantees. This month we have a new sponsor hanging around here, the lovable and talented Quack Quack Honk Designs! A lovely artist from the cold regions of the world…like…those places north of Ohio, QQH is a wonderful artist who appears at art fairs all over the place selling their work, and right now if you jump into the fray at their website you can even use them to design your holiday cards! HOP TO IT, because Art is a form of speech, and my speech says you should buy shit from them!

As I told you last time, myself and Constitutional Law had a love/hate relationship in law school, in no small part because it was a two hour class very fucking early in the morning and I wasn’t ready for any of that deep thought at that point. As a result, while I certainly understand and know con law, I never really got into the in-depth study of it. There’s just not a lot of call for constitutional arguments in the course of keeping a person’s home or defending a DUI, and to the extent there are you pick up that part of it on basic principles and practice, not by the in-depth study of the issuance of letters of marque and shit like that.

Now, as I may have said in the past, the principles of the freedom of speech were basically considered so non-controversial that, in debating the meaning of them, Congress essentially went “that’s really verbose for something we all know what it means, so we’re just gonna pare that shit right there down a bit.” Fuck, as I pointed out last time there was pretty much no discussion about this shit on the floor of the Congress at all at the time it was passed other than someone taking out the red marker and pulling the old Hemingway “say more with less” approach to cutting out what they determined were superfluous words. However, as we now know, the founding fuckers were being a little optimistic in their estimation of mankind’s intelligence in taking this tack, as what happened thereafter was a hodgepodge of judicial determinations as to what the limits and benefits of free speech actually were under the Bill of Rights, leading to the modern interpretation of the short amendment (shorter, in fact, than this post to this point) and its guarantee of basic liberty for the people that live under its rule. And, with the Bill of Rights ratified in 1791, it wasn’t even a full decade before the first major challenge to free speech came to national prominence.

You know, because President John Adams really fucking hated criticism. Enough that he made it a jailable offense.

Free Speech Friday: The First Amendment – One Sentence, 10,000 annotations

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

U.S. Const. Amend. I

Welcome to the first of a new monthly series here on Lawyers & Liquor, which we’re calling “Free Speech Friday.” I’m your host, the Boozy Barrister. Over the next however long it takes us, we’re gonna take one Friday a month to discuss legal issues of free speech and constitutional law here, both areas that I, as a shitty shit lawyer in Shitadelphia, Shitsylvania am not overly familiar with. So, this will be a learning experience for both of us, as Boozy pursues edification and then, like the loving momma bird that I am, promptly turns to vomit up the knowledge into your eagerly cheeping mouths.

Yes, I know, that’s probably someone’s fetish. Put it back in your pants, Pete. We got law to talk about.

More specifically, we have one specific law to talk about, being the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. You can see the whole fucking text of the thing above, one sentence that lasts 45 words and has caused more goddamn trouble to the courts than anything else. One sentence that has been used to guarantee the rights of everyone from activists marching for racial equality to assholes picketing funerals. 45 words that have been interpreted to allow folks to spout 14 words in city center when they seek to do so. Often contentious, and always loud, the First Amendment is, as author and Huffington Post journalist Naomi Wolf said, “designed to allow for disruption of business as usual. It is not a quiet and subdued amendment or right.”

In other words, it is the right to be fucking loud and, in general, do so without fear of restriction from the government. But how, exactly, did we come about gaining that right, written into the very foundational documents of our nation’s history? And why?

That’s what we’re talking about today on Free Speech Friday: the birth of the First Amendment and the why of why we have it. So sit back, grab some popcorn, and let’s get going with an impromptu legal history lesson.

Continue reading “Free Speech Friday: The First Amendment – One Sentence, 10,000 annotations”

The State Can Inoculate – A Legal Discussion of State-Enforced Vaccinations Over Parental Objections, Part 1

Welcome to Wednesday on Lawyers & Liquor! I’m your host the Boozy Barrister, and today we’re gonna start stirring some shit up nice and creamy, a veritable shit stew, regarding the ability of a parent to withhold vaccinations from their children! That’s right, in the far off year of 2018, we’re seriously going to talk about the ability of the state to tell a parent they have absolutely no right to refuse to do something that common sense, common decency, and love for your fucking child should dictate you do goddamn anyhow without the state having to step in and call you a genuine fuckwit.

Goddammit, do I hate people some time.

Anyhow, at the end of this whole thing we’re going to be going over the rights of parents to refuse to inoculate their child for some dipshitty reason or another versus the power of the state to come in and smack the shit out of the self-same parents, forcing them to fucking give their kids a little pokey-pokey for the welfare of the human race as a whole. But before we even start to talk about that, we need to talk about something else, because it all fucking plays into the question of whether or not the government can force a kid to a receive a vaccination over the objections of the parents. We need to, first and foremost, talk about the religious liberty rights of a parent in relation to seeking medical treatment for their kids, and more specifically the rights of the parents who claim to hold religious beliefs that prevent them from seeking medical treatment for their kids.

So, without further ado, let’s look at Part 1 of “The State Can Inoculate” – The Religious Belief and Medical Care!

Continue reading “The State Can Inoculate – A Legal Discussion of State-Enforced Vaccinations Over Parental Objections, Part 1”