Yates v. United States

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Yates v. United States

Argued October 8 – 9, 1956
Decided June 17, 1957

Full case name:	Yates, et al. v. United States

Citations:	354 U.S. 298; 77 S. Ct. 1064; 1 L. Ed. 2d 1356; 1957 U.S. LEXIS 657

Prior history:	Certiorari to the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit

Holding

The Court held that for the Smith Act to be violated, people must be encouraged to do something, rather than merely to believe in something. The Court drew a distinction between a statement of an idea and the advocacy that a certain action be taken.

Court membership

Chief Justice: Earl Warren
Associate Justices: Hugo Black, Felix Frankfurter, William O. Douglas, Harold Hitz Burton, Tom C. Clark, John Marshall Harlan II, William J. Brennan, Jr., Charles Evans Whittaker

Case opinions

Majority by: Harlan
Joined by: Warren, Frankfurter
Concurrence by: Burton
Concurrence/dissent by: Black
Joined by: Douglas
Dissent by: Clark
Brennan, Whittaker took no part in the consideration or decision of the case.

Laws applied

U.S. Const. amend. I

Yates v. United States, 354 U.S. 298 (1957), was a case decided by the Supreme Court of the United States involving free speech and congressional power.

1 Background
2 Issue
3 Opinion
4 See also
5 External links

[edit] Background

In 1951, 14 people were charged with violating the Smith Act for being members of the Communist Party USA in California. The Smith Act made it unlawful to advocate or organize the destruction or overthrow of any government in the United States by force. Yates claimed that his party was engaged in passive actions and that any violation of the Smith Act must involve active attempts to overthrow the government.

[edit] Issue

Whether Yates' First Amendment right to freedom of speech protected her advocating the forceful overthrow of the government.

[edit] Opinion

The Supreme Court of the United States said that for the Smith Act to be violated, people must be encouraged to do something, rather than merely to believe in something. The Court drew a distinction between a statement of an idea and the advocacy that a certain action be taken. The Court ruled that the Smith Act did not prohibit “advocacy of forcible overthrow of the government as an abstract doctrine.” In Justice Black's opinion, he wrote of the original Smith Act trials:

"The testimony of witnesses is comparatively insignificant. Guilt or innocence may turn on what Marx or Engels or someone else wrote or advocated as much as a hundred years or more ago.[...] When the propriety of obnoxious or unfamiliar views about government is in reality made the crucial issue, [...] prejudice makes conviction inevitable except in the rarest circumstances."

The convictions of the indicted members were reversed.