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''Schenck v. United States'', , is a United States Supreme Court decision concerning enforcement of the Espionage Act of 1917 during World War I. A unanimous Supreme Court, in a famous opinion by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., concluded that defendants who distributed leaflets 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 alter the well-established law in cases where the attempt was made through expressions that would be protected in other circumstances. In this opinion, Holmes said that expressions which in the circumstances were intended to result in a crime, and posed a "clear and present danger" of succeeding, could be punished. The Court continued to follow this reasoning to uphold a series of convictions arising out of prosecutions during war time, 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. The "clear and present danger" standard remains the test of criminal prosecutions, but the Court has set another line of precedents to govern cases in which the constitutionality of a statute is challenged on its face. ==Background of the case== Schenck v. United States is 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 those on the radical left and by those who had ties to Ireland or Germany. The Woodrow 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 to the Court, ''Baltzer v. United States'', the defendants had signed a petition criticizing their governor's administration of the draft, threatening him with defeat at the polls. They were charged with obstructing the recruitment and enlistment service, and convicted. When a majority of the Court voted during their conference to affirm the conviction, Holmes quickly drafted and circulated a strongly worded dissenting opinion: Real obstructions of the law, giving real aid and comfort to the enemy, I should have been glad to see punished more summarily and severely than they sometimes were. But I think that our intention to put out all our powers in aid of success in war should not hurry us into intolerance of opinions and speech that could not be imagined to do harm, although opposed to our own. It is better for those who have unquestioned and almost unlimited power in their hands to err on the side of freedom.〔Sheldon Novick, "The Unrevised Holmes and Freedom of Expression," 1991 ''Supreme Court Review'' 303, 389 (1992)〕Rather than proceed in the face of Holmes's biting dissent, Chief Justice Edward Douglass White set the case aside and word of the situation evidently reached the Administration, because the prosecution was abandoned. White then asked Holmes to write the opinion for a unanimous Court in the next case, one in which they could agree, ''Schenck v. United States''. Holmes wrote that opinion, and wrote again for a unanimous court upholding convictions in two more cases that spring, ''Frohwerk v. United States'' and ''Debs v. United States'', establishing what remains the standard for deciding the constitutionality of criminal convictions based on expressive behavior. Holmes disliked legislative-style formulas, and did not repeat the language of "clear and present danger" in any subsequent opinion, however. The Schenck opinion alone accordingly is often cited as the source of this legal standard, and some scholars have suggested that Holmes changed his mind and offered a different view in his equally famous dissent in ''Abrams v. United States''. The events leading to the assignment of the ''Schenck'' opinion to Holmes were discovered when Holmes's biographer Sheldon Novick unearthed the unpublished Baltzer opinion among Holmes's papers at Harvard Law School.〔Sheldon Novick, ("Preface, Honorable Justice at Twenty-five," in ''Honorable Justice: The Life of Oliver Wendell Holmes'' (1989, 2013) )〕 The facts of the ''Schenck Case'' were as follows. Charles Schenck and Elizabeth Baer were members of the Executive Committee of the Socialist Party in Philadelphia, of which Schenck was General Secretary. The executive committee authorized, and Schenck oversaw, printing and mailing more than 15,000 leaflets to men slated for conscription during World War I. The leaflets urged men not to submit to the draft, saying "Do not submit to intimidation", "Assert your rights", "If you do not assert and support your rights, you are helping to deny or disparage rights which it is the solemn duty of all citizens and residents of the United States to retain," and urged men not to comply with the draft on the grounds that military conscription constituted involuntary servitude, which is prohibited by the Thirteenth Amendment.〔Schenck v. United States, 249 U.S. 47, 49-51 (1917)〕 After jury trials Schenck and Baer were convicted of violating Section 3 of the Espionage Act of 1917.〔(【引用サイトリンク】 title =The Espionage Act and The Limitations of the First Amendment ), which prohibited willful obstruction of the recently-enacted draft.〕 Both defendants appealed to the United States Supreme Court, arguing that their conviction, and the statute which purported to authorize it, were contrary to the First Amendment. They relied heavily on the text of the First Amendment, and their claim that the Espionage Act of 1917 had what today one would call a "chilling effect" on free discussion of the war effort.〔() Brief of Plaintiffs in Error〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Schenck v. United States」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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