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Article: PRIOR Restraint.(Brief Article)
- Article from:
- Cobblestone
- Article date:
- January 1, 1999
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1999 Carus Publishing Co. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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What if there were a law that said the government must approve a story before it could be released to the public? Newspapers, magazines, and television and radio stations would need the government's OK before they could publish or release the information. This kind of preapproval is called prior restraint. It is a restriction on speech or other types of expression before they happen.
Our Founding Fathers were afraid that the government might make just such a prior restraint law. Many of those men had come from England, which had a licensing system for printed materials that worked like prior restraint. English church officials established this licensing system ...