Written By: Blake Etringer

Samantha Barbas, who holds the Aliber Family Chair in Law at the University of Iowa College of Law, published an article in the latest issue of the Texas A&M University Law Review.

The article, titled “Originalist Arguments in Free Speech History,” explores the role that originalism has played in American free speech debates. It examines how, during the Red Scare of the 1950s, liberal lawyers, judges, and scholars invoked the original meaning of the First Amendment to argue that government anti-Communist measures amounted to unconstitutional seditious libel, and traces how those arguments later faded before reemerging in new form in the twenty-first century.