Congressional Power and Free Speech: Levy's "Legacy" Revisited

Abstract

Reviewed by William W. Van Alstyne2 I. FIRST IMPRESSIONS In the preface to Emergence of a Free Press, Leonard Levy tells a wonderful story of the book's original appearance twenty-six years ago, in I96o.3 In I957 the Fund for the Republic under Robert Hutchins commissioned Levy to write a memorandum on the original meaning of the first amendment's clauses. The twenty-five pages he produced on the free speech and free press clauses turned out surprisingly, to Levy as well as to the Fund. The conclusions did not vindicate the liberal optimism of the project's sponsors that these clauses were a triumph of early libertarianism. Accordingly, Levy reports, Hutchins "made it clear to me that the pamphlet [which the Fund meant to publish] would not include that section of the work" (p. viii). The Fund's effective censorship of Levy's work was unseemly and unwise. It misjudged the character of the man; it so angered Levy as to drive him to an academic's revenge. From what might have been a mere "but see" minor pamphlet citation against Zechariah Chafee's famous Free Speech in the United States, Levy's memorandum eventually became a tremendously controversial counterweight to Chafee's work. Enormously expanded and deepened in its research, the unprepossessing memorandum became Legacy of Suppression: Freedom of Speech and Press in Early American History. Its principal conclusion, pugnaciously explicit in its title, was devastating.4 Leonard Levy schooled the Fund for the Republic in the poet's claim that "Truth, crushed to earth, shall rise again."5 Levy's fallen

Commitment and Competitive Advantage in a Digital World

“…To provide an answer to this question, we should start from considering how platform businesses differ from traditional ones, and then check if the principles of commitment still apply. Van Alstyne et al (2016), for example, have argued the main differences are three: the shift in the focus from controlling resources to orchestrating resources that are 'owned' by the community, the shift from optimizing internal processes to facilitating external interactions, and the shift from increasing customer value to maximizing ecosystem value. These differences might undermine the value of commitment as described by Ghemawat (1991).…”