Jeet Heer of The Nation‘s podcast Time of Monsters recently discussed The Prosecution of Professor Chandler Davis with Douglas Bell, the husband of Siobhan Roberts, who wrote an obituary about Chan Davis for The Nation. Davis, who died in 2002 at age 96, was one of the notable victims of the second Red Scare. In 1960, Davis was sentenced to six months in prison for refusing to answer questions about his membership in the Communist Party. Davis’s lawyers defended him with the innovative legal argument that the First Amendment barred such questioning. While Davis lost in the courts, his legal battles were still an important effort in a larger battle to extend the parameters on political speech.
The two took up the history of anti-communism and how it has limited free speech, the legal philosophy of Alexander Meiklejohn, and the reactionary Supreme Court’s use of the First Amendment to expand corporate power. Listen below or at Time of Monsters
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