<P> First Amendment freedoms are most in danger when the government seeks to control thought or to justify its laws for that impermissible end . The right to think is the beginning of freedom, and speech must be protected from the government because speech is the beginning of thought . </P> <P> In United States v. Williams (2008), the Court upheld the PROTECT Act of 2003, ruling that prohibiting offers to provide and requests to obtain child pornography did not violate the First Amendment, even if a person charged under the Act did not possess child pornography . </P> <P> In some states, there are Son of Sam laws prohibiting convicted criminals from publishing memoirs for profit . These laws were a response to offers to David Berkowitz to write memoirs about the murders he committed . The Supreme Court struck down a law of this type in New York as a violation of the First Amendment in the case Simon & Schuster v. Crime Victims Board (1991). That statute did not prohibit publication of a memoir by a convicted criminal . Instead, it provided that all profits from the book were to be put in escrow for a time . The interest from the escrow account was used to fund the New York State Crime Victims Board--an organization that pays the medical and related bills of victims of crime . Similar laws in other states remain unchallenged . </P> <P> American tort liability for defamatory speech or publications traces its origins to English common law . For the first two hundred years of American jurisprudence, the basic substance of defamation law continued to resemble that existing in England at the time of the Revolution . An 1898 American legal textbook on defamation provides definitions of libel and slander nearly identical to those given by William Blackstone and Edward Coke . An action of slander required the following: </P>

Definition of freedom of speech in the constitution