Abrams v. United States
| Abrams v. United States | |
|---|---|
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| Argued October 21–22, 1919 Decided November 10, 1919 |
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| Full case name | Jacob Abrams, et al. v. United States |
| Citations | 250 U.S. 616 (more)
40 S. Ct. 17; 63 L. Ed. 1173; 1919 U.S. LEXIS 1784
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| Prior history | Defendants convicted, U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York |
| Subsequent history | None |
| Holding | |
| Defendants' criticism of U.S. involvement in World War I was not protected by the First Amendment, because they advocated a strike in munitions production and the violent overthrow of the government. | |
| Court membership | |
| Case opinions | |
| Majority | Clarke, joined by White, McKenna, Day, Van Devanter, Pitney, McReynolds |
| Dissent | Holmes, joined by Brandeis |
| Laws applied | |
| U.S. Const. amend. I; 50 U.S.C. § 33 (1917) | |
Abrams v. United States, 250 U.S. 616 (1919), was a decision by the Supreme Court of the United States upholding the 1918 Amendment to the Espionage Act of 1917, which made it a criminal offense to urge curtailment of production of the materials necessary to the war against Germany with intent to hinder the progress of the war. The 1918 Amendment is commonly referred to as if it were a separate Act, the Sedition Act of 1918.
The defendants were convicted on the basis of two leaflets they printed and threw from windows of a building in New York City. One leaflet, signed "revolutionists", denounced the sending of American troops to Russia. The second leaflet, written in Yiddish, denounced the war and US efforts to impede the Russian Revolution. It advocated the cessation of the production of weapons to be used against Soviet Russia.
The defendants were charged and convicted of inciting resistance to the war effort and urging curtailment of production of essential war material. They were sentenced to 10 and 20 years in prison. The Supreme Court ruled, 7–2, that the defendants' freedom of speech, protected by the First Amendment, was not violated. Justice John Hessin Clarke in an opinion for the majority held that the defendants' intent to hinder war production could be inferred from their words, and that Congress had determined such expressions posed an imminent danger. Their conviction was accordingly warranted under the "clear-and-present-danger" standard, derived from the common law and announced in Schenck v. United States and companion cases earlier in 1919. Opinions for a unanimous Court in those cases were written by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. In the Abrams case, however, Holmes dissented, rejecting the argument that the defendants' leaflets posed the "clear and present danger" that was true of the defendants in Schenck. In a powerful dissenting opinion joined by Justice Louis Brandeis, he said that the Abrams defendants lacked the specific intent to interfere with the war against Germany, and that they posed no actual risk. He went on to say that even if their acts could be shown to pose a risk of damaging war production, the draconian sentences imposed showed that they were being prosecuted not for their speech, but for their beliefs.
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