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INTRODUCTION.

You have dozens of Constitutional Rights which the government may not impair, restrict, or deny to you.  This blog will outline the development of those rights since they were first adopted after 1791. As you will note through these essays, each of these rights may turn out to be broader than the clear language of the original and enduring guarantees you were given with each right.  You may also note that that each of these rights may turn out to be narrower than the clear language of the original and enduring guarantees you were given with each right. Each legal case that a person brings to assert, defend, or define a constitutional right is different from every other such case.  They differ from each other based on the facts of the dispute, the language of the guarantee, the development of the law by court decisions Chief Justice Lorie Skjerven Gildea of the Minnesota Supreme Court, like every American judge, is sworn to defend your rights under the fed...

1. Your Right to Freedom of Speech. **

2. Your Right to Freedom of the Press. **

The First Amendment provides that "Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of the press." Commentator A,J, Liebling quipped that "freedom of the press belongs only to those who own one."  That is no longer true.  Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and their contemporaries have placed the means to publish news and opinion o every desktop or in every hand. It will be up to the courts to determine whether the rights, responsibilities, and regulation of traditional journalists which have been approved by the courts and legislatures over the past 226 years in America will be extended to "citizen journalists" who rely on the new technologies. Although the Supreme Court has not ruled directly on the question of bloggers and non-traditional journalists, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in Obsidian Finance Group v. Cox in 2014 that bloggers enjoy the same protections from libel claims as traditional newspapers and periodicals.  T he "protections of the...