There is arguably no better moment than right now to study the First Amendment's fascinating history. President Donald Trump's recurrent attacks on the mainstream media and on individual citizens’ political expressions have inspired discussions about the meaning of a free press and speech. A good starting point for these conversations is Wendell Bird's Press and Speech under Assault: The Early Supreme Court Justices, the Sedition Act of 1798, and the Campaign Against Dissent, which is something of a cautionary tale about partisan judges who subjugate their judicial principles in order to effectuate a policy initiative passed in the name of national security. More specifically, this book is about early United States Supreme Court justices’ shifting opinions about First Amendment freedoms after the passage of the Sedition Act, a law passed to squash dissent in anticipation of war with France.

In this American constitutional history, Bird argues that some basic things that we think we know about First Amendment history are wrong or, at the very least, incomplete. The first error that Bird aims to correct is the idea that eighteenth-century legal scholar William Blackstone's narrow interpretation of freedom of the press and of speech represented the eighteenth-century English common law standard, and that such standard was also the norm in eighteenth-century America. Blackstone's interpretation was known as “the freedom from prior restraint,” because it promised individuals the freedom to say whatever they wanted without needing to first secure a license from the state, but did not protect them from the potential legal ramifications of making those remarks. Bird shows that Blackstone's interpretation only became the judicial norm after Lord Chief Justice Mansfield adopted it in 1770. By revealing the relative newness of what he calls the “Blackstone–Mansfield framework,” Bird undermines the idea that there was judicial consensus about First Amendment freedoms at the time of the American Revolution or in the two to three decades that followed it. Instead, Bird emphasizes that, as Blackstone was trying to advance his freedom-from-prior-restraint standard, revolutionaries in America had begun to view the right to criticize the government as paramount.

The second narrative that Bird corrects concerns early United States Supreme Court justices’ opinions about the First Amendment. In part because these justices were all Federalists and in part because of Federalist justices’ partisan prosecution of Republicans under the Sedition Act, scholars have presumed that they shared a uniform opinion about freedom of the press and of speech, which, of course, reflected the Blackstone–Mansfield interpretation of such. Bird, however, shows that the early justices held variegated beliefs about these freedoms. Prior to 1798, rather than champion the Blackstone–Mansfield interpretation, the first six justices “expressed commitment to, not opposition or indifference to” freedom of the press and of speech (114).

That early justices championed broad understandings of freedom of the press and of speech is surprising, given how they responded to the passage of the Sedition Act, a law that congressional Federalists passed in July 1798. The act sanctioned prosecution of individuals who expressed unflattering sentiments about Congress, the president, or the government. Federalists used the Sedition Act to silence Republican newspaper editors who opposed the administration of President John Adams. Although the Supreme Court never ruled on the constitutionality of the law, a number of justices oversaw Sedition Act trials as circuit court judges. In this capacity, they proved willing to uphold and enforce the Sedition Act, despite their earlier opinions. Bird explains these justices’ flip-flopping by pointing to their privileging of “forming a strong state” over the right to dissent (329).

Finally, Bird shows that there were far more prosecutions under the Sedition Act than historians have previously recognized. Added to the fourteen known cases, Bird discovered twenty-two new prosecutions. These new cases reveal “the actual scope of the Federalist administration's efforts to suppress dissent” (368). Additionally, newfound recognition of the broad application of the Sedition Act helps explain subsequent political backlash, which Thomas Jefferson capitalized on to beat Adams in the 1800 presidential election. Ultimately, Bird asserts, early justices’ differences of opinion about freedom of the press and of speech, particularly as they concerned the Sedition Act, hastened the development of a two party system and revealed two distinct forms of early American Republicanism.

There are a number of reasons why this book deserves praise. Bird's extensive research merits applause; he found previously unknown court documents and manuscripts, which collectively transform the canon of sedition cases. Moreover, this work shows that debates about the First Amendment before 1800 are far richer and more complex than scholars have recognized. By demonstrating that the earliest justices held a range of opinions about freedom of the press and of speech, especially before 1798, this work also upends categorization of early American legal thinkers by party affiliation. Finally, this book undermines assertions by historians of the Progressive Era, who attribute the earliest broad interpretations of the First Amendment to early twentieth century legal thinkers. Bird's work complements that of historians such as David Rabban, who have expanded the chronological framework of First Amendment historiography.

Still, this book is not without some shortcomings, which primarily concern reader accessibility. Bird presumes that his readers know the history and historiographical debates that he discusses. For example, despite the Sedition Act constituting a central temporal marker in his work, Bird omits any meaningful explanation of it in the Introduction. At various times, Bird introduces historical figures without explaining who they are, and mentions historians without using their first names. Finally, this book would have benefited from better organization; each chapter is needlessly broken up by section headings, making it read more like a collection of law review articles than like a streamlined narrative.

Despite its imperfections, Press and Speech Under Assault is a laudable contribution to American constitutional history and free speech and press historiography. In a time when the United States president has expressed his desire to “open up the libel laws,” and has called for private organizations to fire individuals who challenge him, this book reminds us that many of the original United States Supreme Court justices supported a broad interpretation of the First Amendment, favoring more political expression, not less.