JUSTICE NEWS

Attorney General Sessions Delivers Remarks at the Heritage Foundation’s Legal Strategy Forum
Washington, DC
 ~ 
Thursday, October 26, 2017
Remarks as prepared for delivery

Thank you for that introduction.

President Trump spoke here a little more than a week ago.  In eloquent terms, he talked about the legal traditions handed down to us which are the “legacy” of our Founders.  He spoke of the urgent necessity to “rededicate ourselves to the defense of our God-given rights” and he has done more than talk.  He is nominating truly outstanding judges for our courts who understand these principles.  I am very proud of this judicial record and to serve in his Justice Department.

On the law, he couldn’t be more correct.  We must above all vigorously defend the inalienable rights that are part of our heritage and especially religious liberty and freedom of speech.  These are the very first freedoms the Founders put in the Bill of Rights—and not by accident.  They are first because our freedom to worship and to speak our minds are at the core of what it means to be free.

Our Founders believed that reason is the best means to truth and justice.  Reason requires discourse and, frequently, argument.  The Father of our Constitution, James Madison, said, in protest of the Alien and Sedition Acts—the speech codes of his day—that freedom of speech is “the only effectual guardian of every other right.”

In every generation, there have been those who say that certain speech is not deserving of protection.  Many of these people are well-intentioned.  But, as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once wrote: “If there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other it is the principle of free thought—not free thought for those who agree with us, but freedom for the thought that we hate.”

When it was the Federalists against the Anti-federalists, Abraham Lincoln against Stephen Douglas, Martin Luther King against George Wallace, and in so many episodes in our history, speech led Americans to better decisions and a more just society.