For the past year, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE, the nonpartisan, nonprofit organization where I work) has been building up resources in our new First Amendment Library. This week, we’ve added a feature that I hope will help anyone interested in First Amendment issues understand the terms commonly used in legal and academic discussions about these rights: the First Amendment Glossary.
With over 75 terms included, FIRE’s First Amendment Glossary is meant to be a quick guide for those who are interested in free speech advocacy but may not have the time or inclination to pore over academic literature and case law in order to understand issues such as the the difference between “public forums” and “limited public forums.”
The glossary gives visitors brief definitions for terms that commonly emerge when discussing civil liberties issues, and it additionally directs readers to other areas of FIRE’s First Amendment Library that offer extended commentary and primary documents, such as Supreme Court opinions that have colored the jurisprudence surrounding particular terms.
For example, if a reader views the term “prior restraint” in our glossary, they will be directed to the portion of FIRE’s Guide to Free Speech on Campus that discusses how prior restraint has been interpreted through the years—from the Supreme Court’s argument for why the publication of the “Pentagon Papers” did not necessitate prior restraint, to the battle college journalists have faced to keep the precedent set by a high school student newspaper case allowing for prior restraint from being applied to their campus newspapers.
We hope that this new feature (and others introduced previously in our First Amendment Library) will give visitors to our library a richer understanding of free speech issues and empower them to teach and discuss with others.