Schenck and Abrams Cases
Schenck and Abrams Cases (1919).Under the 1917 Espionage Act, Charles T. Schenck, a high official in the Socialist Party of America, was arrested for urging resistance to the draft. His pamphlet, sent to draftees, condemned conscription as despotic and unconstitutional. In sustaining Schenck's conviction, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., based his standard for expression on the common law rule of proximate causation. His “clear and present danger” test became the starting point for subsequent free speech cases until the 1960s. Critics, however, deplored the subjectivity of the rule and Holmes's insensitivity to its larger implications for free speech.
The subsequent Abrams case, brought under the 1918 Sedition Act, involved the trial of an anarchist Russian immigrant, Jacob Abrams, and his supporters for distributing pamphlets, mainly in Yiddish, calling for a general strike to protest the...
[The entire page is 290 words long]
Join eNotes
Over 3,500 study guides, question and answer forums, literature criticism, reference content, and much more!
Oxford University Press Titles
