[gottagetmac]

Learning "a little about the 1st amendment" and pondering it "a little in a few minutes" is a dangerous thing. From just looking at this text, for example, you would think that it only applied to Congress, when actually it also applies to the executive branch, the judicial branch, and states and local government (since the Fourteenth Amendment and the incorporation cases).

I also think this narrow view has made you jump to a much stronger conclusion than is warranted. At least one scholar has considered whether the First Amendment could be interpreted to require that contracts of silence be unenforceable. http://www.lawschool.cornell.edu/research/cornell-law-review...

In this case you happen to be mostly right, but don't assume you can understand the contours of First Amendment law just by looking at the text. There is a vast apparatus that has been built around the First Amendment, little of which is deducible from the constitutional text alone.

[spikels]

It's pretty sad but you what you say is correct: We can no longer just read our laws in order to understand what they say. Instead we need to pay lawyers to tell us what they mean even when they appear to be very clear like the first amendment.

And of course like your scholar they are free to make up there own interpretation at any time. If they can get enough of their colleagues to go along then that interpretation becomes the meaning. Maybe start with something reasonable like shouting fire in a theatre.

But after two hundred years that meaning can drift pretty far. What was originally purely a constraint on the power of government can be transformed into a constraint on the rights of private citizens - the very people the bill of rights was meant to protect!

Is there any wonder why the forth amendment has done so little to stop mass surveillance? Or individual health insurance mandates are constitutional because they could have been implemented as a tax? Or the commerce clause covers absolutely anything? Or words like "is" and "no" can simply be redefined as needed.

Perhaps I am naive but I would like laws that most people can understand by reading them. Too bad the people interpreting and writing our laws have every incentive to continue to do exactly the opposite.

Sorry for the rant!

[gottagetmac]

You're never going to have a useful legal system where the laws are simple enough for everyone to understand. Free speech is a complex idea.

To put it in HN terms, suppose I were to say "It's pretty sad that we can no longer look at assembly code to understand what our computer programs will do. Instead we need to pay software engineers to tell us how they work even when it's doing something simple, like running a search engine."

[dwc]

Learning a little and pondering a little is far less dangerous than learning nothing. Learning how it's been interpreted over the years is better, of course. But a simple reading of the text would benefit many people and the public discourse. Once you have that, adding the interpretation that congress shouldn't make laws be extended to "the entire government shall not interfere with" isn't a big stretch. But whatever level of understanding one hopes to achieve, the place to start is with the text.

And it's not just this article. See almost any discussion forum where moderation has come up and you'll find invocations of the first amendment. See Sarah Palin saying her first amendment rights were violated because she was criticized in the media (and the assenting opinions by far too many). On and on. These people, who make a very specific claim, have not even bothered to check the basis of it. They wouldn't need to learn too much of the finer nuances to realize their claims were invalid.