LAD #2

Alex Eberts 7 September 2006
LAD #2 Period 2

1. Peter Zenger was the printer and editor for the New York Weekly Journal.

2. The controversy over the Peter Zenger charges was that in his newspaper he and his writers were criticizing the new governor. The new governor was a royal governor and at the time it was illegal to criticize the British government. His lawyer Alexander Hamilton defended him by telling the truth. Hamilton said that Zenger had published the offending articles, but that they could not be considered libel because they were true. If they had been false then they could be considered libel. He also said that Zenger was just practicing his right to freedom of speech.

3. The influence that the Zenger trial had on American governmental tradition is that the jury started thinking that if our freedom of speech is infringed upon then our other rights can be infringed upon. Then when the Bill of Rights was being written the first amendment was Freedom of Speech, it was made so that another event like the Zenger trial wouldn’t happen again.

4. The lasting significance of this trial is that Freedom of Speech was put into the Bill of Rights as the first amendment. This amendment protects our right to Freedom of Speech today. Also the Zenger trial set a precedent that juries could abolish rules they found were unfair or unjust.