First Amendment to the United States Constitution

The First Amendment to the United States Constitution is a part of the United States Bill of Rights. Textually, it prevents the U.S. Congress from infringing on six rights. It forbids laws that:

International significance

Most provisions of the United States Bill of Rights are based on the English Bill of Rights (1689) and on other aspects of English law. The English Bill of Rights, however, does not include many of the protections found in the First Amendment. For example, while the First Amendment guarantees freedom of speech to the general populace, the English Bill of Rights only protected "freedom of speech and debates or proceedings in Parliament." The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, a French revolutionary document passed only weeks before Congress proposed the Bill of Rights, contains certain guarantees that are similar to the First Amendment's. For instance, it suggests that "every citizen may, accordingly, speak, write, and print with freedom."

Related Topics:
English Bill of Rights - 1689 - Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen

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Freedom of speech in the United States is more extensive than nearly any other nation in the world. While the First Amendment does not explicitly set restrictions on freedom of speech, other declarations of rights sometimes do so. The European Convention on Human Rights, for example, permits restrictions "in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or the rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary," and in practice these loopholes have been interpreted quite broadly by the courts of Europe.

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The First Amendment was one of the first guarantees of religious freedom: neither the English Bill of Rights, nor the French Declaration of Rights, contains an equivalent guarantee.

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