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Announcing FIRE’s Justice Robert H. Jackson Fellowship

FIRE is pleased to announce the creation of the Justice Robert H. Jackson Fellowship. 

The Jackson Fellowship was established this year in honor of the late Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, whose extraordinary commitment to liberty, independent thought and constitutional principle serves as a sterling example to FIRE and all who value freedom and the courage required to sustain it. 

The Jackson Fellowship will provide recent law school graduates an opportunity to work closely with FIRE’s President and Director of Legal and Public Advocacy, engaging issues and cases that represent the cutting edge of First Amendment jurisprudence. The Jackson Fellow will work full-time at FIRE’s Philadelphia office, beginning in the Fall of 2007. 
 
More information about the Jackson Fellowship is available here.
 
FIRE is tremendously proud to pay tribute to Justice Jackson, whose illuminating eloquence lights our way forward still:
“Those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters. Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard.
It seems trite but necessary to say that the First Amendment to our Constitution was designed to avoid these ends by avoiding these beginnings. There is no mysticism in the American concept of the State or of the nature or origin of its authority. We set up government by consent of the governed, and the Bill of Rights denies those in power any legal opportunity to coerce that consent. Authority here is to be controlled by public opinion, not public opinion by authority.

To believe that patriotism will not flourish if patriotic ceremonies are voluntary and spontaneous instead of a compulsory routine is to make an unflattering estimate of the appeal of our institutions to free minds. We can have intellectual individualism and the rich cultural diversities that we owe to exceptional minds only at the price of occasional eccentricity and abnormal attitudes. When they are so harmless to others or to the State as those we deal with here, the price is not too great. But freedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter much. That would be a mere shadow of freedom. The test of its substance is the right to differ as to things that touch the heart of the existing order.

If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein. If there are any circumstances which permit an exception, they do not now occur to us.” 

- Justice Robert H. Jackson, West Virginia State Bd. of Educ. v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624, 641-42 (1943) 

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