The First Amendment
Research papers on the First Amendment explores the right to privacy for US Citizens. You can have a research paper written on any part of the First Amendment that you wish. Learn how to write political science research papers on constitutional issues or political science topics.
The First Amendment of the United States Constitution guarantees the following rights:
In general, this is a relatively simple proposition, but it does become complicated when rights of one person conflict with the rights of another person. It is my position that even if the rights of privacy of some people are hindered, freedom of speech and the press must be maintained. Freedom of the press, and dissemination of information, is not particularly different from freedom of speech. Both are basic protections of expression. The media do not have any special rights or privileges not afforded to citizens in general. This means that the average citizen has as much right to any document as the news media, and conversely, the news media is the representative of the citizenry of the nation. When public records are withheld from the media, the information is being withheld from the public.
The question becomes, what are the exceptions, and who decides what those exceptions will be. Some will argue that a person, or a politician, has a right to privacy. Does the public have a right to know, for instance, if a politician has a drinking problem or some other secret? Autopsies are also a controversial area, where the privacy of the family of a deceased person weighs against the public's right to know. The families may object to an autopsy being released, but failure to release such information could be used as a precedent for not releasing other documents. It could have a snowball effect, and therefore the records must be open to the public to protect the publics right to all other documents.
The Kennedy family managed to suppress results of John F. Kennedy's autopsy report through a legal loophole. At the time of his assassination, all papers related to the President were the property of the president, and not government property. Because of this, they were not legally public documents until the law was changed in 1981.