One legal expert is telling Americans that abridgment, not coercion, is the standard in a landmark free speech rights case.
Philip Hamburger, a Columbia University legal scholar and CEO of the New Civil Liberties Alliance, took on what he argued is an incorrect standard for a landmark case. As the free speech case, Murthy v. Missouri, is before the U.S. Supreme Court, George Mason University Law Professor Ilya Somin argued for Reason Magazine that government “coercion” is the standard in determining constitutional violations. Hamburger, however, who represents most of the case’s individual plaintiffs, explained in a piece in Reason that the standard is abridgment, and the government does not have the power to violate Americans’ free speech, even if provable coercion is not involved.
The “First Amendment bars government from ‘abridging’ the…
