No one's ever been convicted of violating this companion to the Alien and Sedition Act. There's a reason for that..
It is probably unconstitutional. Enacted by the Congress that brought you the Alien and Sedition acts, the law is too vague for enforcement. And it violates free-speech standards that are the law today but went unrecognized by the John Adams administration.
Ordinarily I would start a column like this by reviewing the binding judicial interpretations of the law over the centuries. The problem is, there aren’t any. Exactly one person has been indicted for violating the law, a Kentucky farmer named Francis Flournoy who in 1803 wrote a newspaper article advocating the creation of a separate country that would ally itself with France. Flournoy left Kentucky before the trial could start. It appears, based on research by my late colleague Detlev Vagts, that no one has been prosecuted under the law since.
The text of the law says that a citizen is guilty of a crime if without authority he “directly or indirectly . carries on any correspondence or intercourse with any foreign government . with intent to influence [it]. in relation to any disputes or controversies with the U.S. or to defeat the measures of the U.S.” The punishment is an unspecified fine and up to three years in prison.
The law doesn’t define “disputes or controversies” between the foreign country and the U.S., nor does it say what it means to “defeat the measures of the U.S.”
