The Fourth Annual Kermit Hall Memorial Lecture

Dr. Carl Swidorski, Emeritus Professor, Poltical Science

Freedom of Speech and Association in the US: From the People Who Brought You the Eight Hour Day

Thursday, September 24, 2009 Picotte Recital Hall, Massry Center for the Arts

Dr. Swidorski examined how the development of freedom of speech and expression owed more to the activities of working people, especially in the labor movement, than to judges, legal scholars or any other group or social movement. Strong protection for freedom of expression was not the Supreme Court’s legal doctrine from the Constitution’s origins, but was a position it only arrived at 150 years later. Between the 1870s and 1930s, labor struggled to organize unions and fight against the restrictions on their expression imposed by judicial injunctions. In response to these activities, and the massive restrictions on civil liberties during World War I, the Supreme Court finally began to consider the question of whether the First Amendment provided a broad constitutional right to freedom of expression. Only in the late 1930s did the Court provide a new conception of freedom of speech as a “preferred freedom” in our constitutional system. Ironically, as the labor movement helped gain these new constitutional rights for all citizens, it slowly lost such constitutional protections for itself.

Swidorski, professor emeritus of political science at Saint Rose, was a member of the College’s history and political science department for 30 years. He has published extensively on issues of civil liberties, civil rights, and the Supreme Court. He was awarded the College’s Thomas Manion Distinguished Faculty Award, twice won the Christian Bay Award from the Caucus for a New Political Science and has received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities. He was a member of the editorial board of New Political Science and served as secretary/treasurer and member of the executive committee of the Caucus for a New Political Science. He also served as president of the Saint Rose chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). Swidorski holds doctoral and master’s degrees from the University at Albany.