Schenck v. United States

Schenck v. United States, 249 U.S. 47 (1919), was a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court 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 Charles Schenck, who distributed flyers 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 protect Schenck from prosecution, even though, "in many places and in ordinary times, Schenck, in saying all that was said in the circular, would have been within his constitutional rights. But the character of every act depends upon the circumstances in which it is done." In this case, Holmes said, "the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent." Therefore, Schenck could be punished. The Court continued 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. However, the Court has set another line of precedents to govern cases in which the constitutionality of a statute is challenged on its face. In 1969, Schenck was largely overturned by Brandenburg v. Ohio, which limited the scope of banned speech to that which would be directed to and likely to incite imminent lawless action (e.g. a riot). Background Schenck 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 Socialists, Pacifist, Isolationist and those who had ties to Germany. The 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 before the CourtBaltzer v. United States, 248 U.S.