for office—but only if the criticism were determined by a judge to be both “true” and made “in a decent manner” and for the purpose of “properly” affecting the outcome of the election.^[278] So political campaigns would be subject to criminal prosecution if a judge decided improper statements had been made.

 In 2008, Justice Scalia, writing in District of Columbia v. Heller, a landmark Second Amendment case involving the right to possession of firearms, quoted a snippet from the Blanding opinion: “The liberty of the press was to be unrestrained, but he who used it was to be responsible in cases of its abuse; like the right to keep fire arms, which does not protect him who uses them for annoyance or destruction."^[279] Justice Scalia used this quotation in his argument that the right to bear arms was originally understood to be an individual right; he argued that the quotation would not make sense otherwise. The reference to Blanding might be taken as only a passing reference to freedom of the press, except that Justice Scalia (in a Second Amendment case) repeatedly returned to the subject of restrictions on press freedom, asserting that “we do not read the First Amendment to protect the right of citizens to speak for any purpose”^[280] and that the “First Amendment contains the freedom-of-speech guarantee that the people ratified, which included exceptions for obscenity, libel, and disclosure of state secrets, but not for the expression of extremely unpopular and wrong-headed views.”^[281] Justice Scalia did not elaborate on these restrictions in Heller. The only precedent he offered for the proposition that “abuses” of the press are not protected by press freedom was the Blanding case. Thus while the Heller opinion did not go so far as to propose that the Blanding decision actually does reflect the original meaning of the press freedom guarantee, it did treat Blanding as if it were still a valid precedent in the press freedom area, rather than as a long discredited decision that presented an unduly restrictive doctrine of press freedom.

[278] Id. at 316.

[279] Heller, 128 S. Ct. at 2803, citing Blanding, 20 Mass. at 314.

[280] Heller, 128 S.Ct. at 2799.

[281] Heller, 128 S.Ct. at 2821.