Zechariah Chafee

Zechariah Chafee

Zechariah Chafee, 1907 (Brown Archives)
Full name	Zechariah Chafee
Born	December 7, 1885(1885-12-07) Providence, Rhode Island
Died	February 8, 1957(1957-02-08) (aged 71) Boston, Massachusetts
Era	20th-century philosophy
Region	Western philosophy
Main interests	Constitutional law, Freedom of speech
Influenced by Milton · Mill · Pound · Laski · Croly · Hand
Influenced Holmes · Brandeis

Zechariah Chafee, Jr. (December 7, 1885 – February 8, 1957) was an American judicial philosopher and civil libertarian. An advocate for free speech, he was described by Senator Joseph McCarthy as "dangerous" to the United States. Legal scholar Richard Primus called Chafee “possibly the most important First Amendment scholar of the first half of the twentieth century.”

Biography

Born in Providence, Rhode Island, he graduated from Brown University, where he was a member of Alpha Delta Phi, in 1907. Later, he received a law degree from Harvard University, completing his LL.B. in 1913. He practiced at the law firm of Tillinghast & Collins from 1913-1916. He became a professor at Harvard in 1916, where he remained until 1956.

Chafee wrote several works about civil liberties, including:

• Freedom of Speech, 1920
• Free speech in the United States, 1941 (expanded edition of Freedom of Speech)
• Government and Mass Communications, 1947
• The Blessings of Liberty, 1956

Freedom of Speech in War Times

Chafee's first significant work (Freedom of Speech) established modern First Amendment theory. Inspired by the United States' suppression of radical speech and ideas during the First World War, Chafee edited and updated a collection of several of his law review articles. In these individual articles-cum-chapters, he assessed significant World War I cases, including those of Emma Goldman.

He revised and reissued this work in 1941 as Free Speech in the United States, which became a leading treatise on First Amendment law. His scholarship on civil liberties was a major influence on Oliver Wendell Holmes' and Louis Brandeis' post-World War I jurisprudence, which first established the First Amendment as a significant source of civil liberties. Chafee met with Justice Holmes after the Schenck case (1919), which upheld a conviction of an activist who encouraged draft resistance, and convinced him that free speech needed greater consideration. Shortly thereafter, Holmes joined Brandeis in a dissent in another World War I dissent case; this dissent is recognized as the foundation of modern First Amendment jurisprudence.

Chafee died in Boston, Massachusetts, on February 8, 1957.

Family

Chafee was the scion of a notable Rhode Island family that traced its Rhode Island lineage back to Roger Williams. His father, Zechariah Chafee (Sr.), was long affiliated with Brown University. Chafee's nephew was Senator John Chafee and his grandnephew is current Governor and former Senator Lincoln Chafee.

Further reading

• Zechariah Chafee (1964). Free Speech in the United States (6th print ed.). Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 
• Zechariah Chafee, Jr., and Erika S. Chadbourn. The Zecharia Chafee, Jr. Papers (Jan. 1987) (American Legal Manuscripts from the Harvard Law School Library; microform)
• Griswold, Erwin N. (1957). "Zechariah Chafee, Jr.". Harvard Law Review (The Harvard Law Review Association) 70 (8): 1337–1340. JSTOR 1337592. 
• Hindman, Elizabeth Blanks (1992). "First Amendment Theories and Press Responsibility: The Work of Zechariah Chafee, Thomas Emerson, Vincent Blasi and Edwin Baker". Journalism Quarterly 69 (1): 48–64. ISSN 01963031. 
• Rabban, David M. (1999). Free Speech in Its Forgotten Years, 1870-1920. New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521655374. 
• Ragan, Fred D. (1971). "Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Zechariah Chafee, Jr., and the Clear and Present Danger Test for Free Speech: The First Year, 1919". Journal of American History (Organization of American Historians) 58 (1): 24–45. doi:10.2307/1890079. JSTOR 1890079. 
• Smith, Donald L. (1986). Zechariah Chafee, Jr.: Defender of Liberty and Law. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. ISBN 0674966856. 
• Wertheimer, John; Chafee, Zechariah (1994). "Freedom of Speech: Zechariah Chafee and Free-Speech History". Reviews in American History (The Johns Hopkins University Press) 22 (2): 367–377. doi:10.2307/2702912. JSTOR 2702912. 

External links

• University of Arkansas's Free Speech Philosophers — Zechariah Chafee
• "Finding aid for Zechariah Chafee, Papers, 1898-1957.". Harvard Law School Library. http://oasis.lib.harvard.edu/oasis/deliver/findingAidDisplay?_collection=oasis&inoid=4800.