The First Amendment

The First Amendment is a comprehensive casebook suitable for adoption in courses on the First Amendment, Mass Media Law, or Law and Religion. Part I of the casebook covers classic freedom of expression issues; part II is a detailed and largely self-contained treatment of mass media law and its relation to the First Amendment; and part III contains a comprehensive treatment of the Religion Clauses.

Organized around scores of hypothetical problems, The First Amendment challenges the student to think rather than memorize. Smolla begins each doctrinal subsection of the book with a hypothetical problem and follows with cases and materials germane to the problem which provide the student with the means for analysis. In each doctrinal area the principal landmark Supreme Court cases are presented, followed by shorter treatments of other Supreme Court decisions, lower court decisions, and commentaries.