The Alien and Sedition Acts

New York Times bestselling author and civil rights lawyer Qian Julie Wang introduces the highly controversial Alien and Sedition Acts, which have been used to justify the curtailing of basic freedoms from the Revolutionary Era through the present day. In the summer of 1798, backed by President John Adams, the United States Congress passed a series of laws that would come to be known as the Alien and Sedition Acts, testing the limits of a Constitution barely a decade old. Passed in anticipation o