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The Bill of Rights, 2nd Edition

Murdock v. Pennsylvania

by Richard L. Wilson

Citation: 319 U.S. 105

Announced: May 3, 1943

Issue: Preferred freedoms doctrine

Relevant Amendment: First

Brief Summary: The Supreme Court declared that the First Amendment guarantees of freedom of religion, press, and speech occupied a preferred position in U.S. constitutional law.

Justice William O. Douglas wrote the opinion for the 5-4 majority, striking down a city ordinance that required the Jehovah’s Witnesses, a religious group, to pay a license tax to go door to door distributing literature and soliciting funds. Murdoch v. Pennsylvania was one of a series of cases commonly known as the Jehovah’s Witnesses cases in which the Supreme Court struck down a wide range of limits on the group’s activities as prior restraints on its freedom of religion, speech, and press. Justices Felix Frankfurter, Stanley F. Reed, Robert H. Jackson, and Owen J. Roberts dissented, maintaining that municipalities had the right to levy reasonable, nondiscriminatory taxes on the sale of religious literature.

Although the Court endorsed the “preferred freedoms” doctrine in Murdock, a majority of the justices were no longer supporting the doctrine by the early 1950’s. During the decade of the 1960’s, however, the substance of the doctrine was absorbed into the concepts of fundamental rights, selective incorporation, and strict scrutiny.

Citation Types

Type
Format
MLA 9th
Wilson, Richard L. "Murdock V. Pennsylvania." The Bill of Rights, 2nd Edition, edited by Thomas Tandy Lewis, Salem Press, 2017. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=BOR2e_0399.
APA 7th
Wilson, R. L. (2017). Murdock v. Pennsylvania. In T. T. Lewis (Ed.), The Bill of Rights, 2nd Edition. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Wilson, Richard L. "Murdock V. Pennsylvania." Edited by Thomas Tandy Lewis. The Bill of Rights, 2nd Edition. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2017. Accessed December 14, 2025. online.salempress.com.