Schenck v. United States
| Schenck v. United States | |
|---|---|
|
|
| Argued January 8–10, 1919 Decided March 3, 1919 |
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| Full case name | Charles T. Schenck v. United States, Elizabeth Baer v. United States |
| Citations | 249 U.S. 47 (more)
63 L. Ed. 470; 1919 U.S. LEXIS 2223; 17 Ohio L. Rep. 26; 17 Ohio L. Rep. 149
|
| Prior history | Defendants convicted, E.D. Pa.; motion for new trial denied, 253 F. 212 (E.D. Pa. 1918) |
| Subsequent history | None |
| Holding | |
| Defendant's criticism of the draft was not protected by the First Amendment, because it created a clear and present danger to the enlistment and recruiting service of the U.S. armed forces during a state of war. | |
| Court membership | |
| Case opinions | |
| Majority | Holmes, joined by unanimous |
| Laws applied | |
| 50 U.S.C. § 33 | |
Schenck v. United States, 249 U.S. 47 (1919), is a United States Supreme Court case concerning enforcement of the Espionage Act of 1917 during World War I. A unanimous Supreme Court, in an opinion by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., concluded that defendants who distributed fliers to draft-age men, urging resistance to induction, could be convicted of an attempt to obstruct the draft, a criminal offense. The First Amendment did not alter the well-established law in cases where the attempt was made through expressions that would be protected in other circumstances. In this opinion, Holmes said that expressions which in the circumstances were intended to result in a crime, and posed a "clear and present danger" of succeeding, could be punished.
The Court didn't continue to follow this reasoning to uphold a series of convictions arising out of prosecutions during wartime, but Holmes began to dissent in the case of Abrams v. United States, insisting that the Court had departed from the standard he had crafted for them, and had begun to allow punishment for ideas. But the Court has set another line of precedents to govern cases in which the constitutionality of a statute is challenged on its face.
Schenck v. United States was the first in a line of Supreme Court Cases defining the modern understanding of the First Amendment. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. wrote the often-cited opinion in the case, because of events that were not publicly known at the time. The United States' entry into the First World War had caused deep divisions in society, and was vigorously opposed, especially by those on the radical left and by those who had ties to Ireland or Germany. The Woodrow Wilson Administration launched a broad campaign of criminal enforcement that resulted in thousands of prosecutions. Many of these were for trivial acts of dissent. In the first case arising from this campaign to come to the Court, Baltzer v. United States, the defendants had signed a petition criticizing their governor's administration of the draft, threatening him with defeat at the polls. They were charged with obstructing the recruitment and enlistment service, and convicted. When a majority of the Court voted during their conference to affirm the conviction, Holmes quickly drafted and circulated a strongly worded dissenting opinion:
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