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5 Y.B. Comm. on Freedom Speech Speech Ass'n Am. 1 (1966)

handle is hein.journals/firsamtu5 and id is 1 raw text is: I. ANNUAL SURVEY OF THE LAW: THE FIRST AMENDMENT IN THE COURTS, 1965-1966 The year just passed has been an active one for legal cases affecting freedoms of expression. The Supreme Court was particularly active. Important new decisions concerning obscenity, legislative investigations, defamation, and loyalty oaths figured prominently in the high Court's docket during the 1965 Term. The lower courts were also active this year. Many cases in the federal district courts and courts of appeals raised important questions ranging from demonstrations and the burning of draft cards on the one hand to importation of allegedly obscene material on the other. In the state courts, too, the year was an important one for First Amendment freedoms. Acting under a Supreme Court mandate, several state courts struck down local regulations restricting demonstrations and protests. State courts were also increasingly burdened by questions involving liability for defaming public officials arising under the New York Times decision. Overall, there has been such extensive activity in the First Amendment field this past year that the discernment of trends is difficult. Thus the function of this essay will simply be to report, leaving the analysis and interpretation to the reader. This survey begins where the 1965 survey left off, at the beginning of the Supreme Court's 1965 Term. In the manner of previous surveys, it attempts to divide the cases into rough categories for ease of reference and harmony of discussion. Obviously the categories blur many distinctions between cases and force cases concerned with several aspects of free expression into one mold, when they might with equal logic have been placed elsewhere. The survey has not tried to report every case in the field during the last year, but only those that seemed interesting or important either in terms of the legal questions involved, or because of their significance for students of speech. A word about citations may be appropriate before beginning the survey. Most of the decisions cited here have already been officially reported, either in the United States reports (U.S', , for Supreme Court decisions), or in the Federal Reports (F.2d for court of appeals, and F. Supp. for district court decisions); or in the regional reports which include state court decisions throughout the country (A.2d for Atlantic, N.E.2d for Northeast, etc.). A few decisions, however, have not appeared in these official reports -- either because they are too recent to permit official publication, or because they come from a court which does not regularly submit its decisions to the publishers. Only in New York, for example, are state trial court decisions ever reported, and even there not all cases are printed. For these unreported decisions, one must rely on the Bureau of National Affairs' comprehensive weekly service, United States Law Week (U.S.L.Week). This publication is available in most law libraries and a few general libraries. For anyone interested in cases not reported even in the Law Week, the most complete compilation is undoubtedly the Civil Liberties Docket, published monthly in Berkeley, California, which is replete with information about cases throughout the civil rights-civil liberties field.

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