Definition
PRESS carries three distinct legal meanings that span procedural history, constitutional law, and the law of torts and civil liberties. Context determines which meaning applies.
1. Old English practice (parchment press). A piece or skin of parchment. Several such pieces were sewn together to form a roll or record of court proceedings. The term referred to the physical substrate of the record, not to its contents. This meaning is archaic and appears only in early English practice materials and historical commentary.
2. The institution of publishing; the news media. In its constitutional and civil-liberties sense, the press means the aggregate of publications, periodicals, and journalists through which information and opinion are conveyed to the public. This is the operative meaning in the phrase "liberty of the press" and in First Amendment jurisprudence. It encompasses not only print newspapers but, under modern doctrine, broadcast and digital journalism.
3. The act or art of printing; publication generally. Bouvier used this sense — the press as printing technology and the legal consequences flowing from its use. Under this meaning, any person has the right to print and publish what they choose, subject to legal liability for harm caused to others (defamation, copyright infringement, obscenity, and the like) and to governmental regulation consistent with constitutional limits.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): To exert physical force; to compress, flatten, or activate by pressure. In common English, press is predominantly a verb describing the application of force.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Webster's 1913 does not supply a directly relevant definition for the publishing or legal senses; the listed entry describes an East Indian insectivore unrelated to legal usage.
The gap between common and legal meaning is significant. In ordinary speech, press is almost always a verb. In law, it operates as a noun with three distinct referents — a procedural artifact, a constitutional institution, and a publishing technology. A researcher encountering "liberty of the press" or "freedom of the press" in a legal text should understand the term is not describing a physical action but an institution with constitutional protection. The noun form "the press" as a collective reference to journalism has no precise parallel in everyday verb usage.
Common Confusion
Two confusions recur in research:
First, conflation of the press as an institution with the press as technology. Early authorities, including Bouvier, defined the press largely in terms of the printing art itself. Modern constitutional doctrine has detached "the press" from any particular technology and extended it to cover all journalism regardless of medium. Researchers reading nineteenth-century sources should note that arguments built on the mechanics of print may not translate to broadcast or digital contexts.
Second, the Burrill entry for PRESS reproduces material that appears to concern presumption or inference — likely a typesetting or indexing error in the historical dictionary, not a legitimate legal meaning of "press." Researchers should not treat that Burrill passage as defining a fourth sense of the term.
Why It Matters in Research
Constitutional research is the dominant use case. The First Amendment's Press Clause has generated an enormous body of doctrine distinct from, though often overlapping with, the Speech Clause. Key research traps:
Historical sources underdefine the institution. Nineteenth-century dictionaries, including Black's and Bouvier's, treat the press primarily as a technology or a metaphor for publication. They do not anticipate the modern doctrinal questions — reporter's privilege, prior restraint, access rights, shield laws — that dominate contemporary press-law research. Do not rely on dictionary definitions alone to understand the constitutional dimensions of the term.
The press-as-institution question is contested. A live doctrinal debate concerns whether the Press Clause confers rights on journalists as a distinct class beyond those available to ordinary speakers. Some authorities argue the clause protects an institutional press; others treat it as simply reinforcing speech rights. Historical sources give no useful guidance on this question. Researchers must move directly to constitutional case law and the encyclopedia entries referenced above.
Prior restraints and publication rights. Bouvier's framing — that persons may publish freely but are liable for harms caused — remains broadly accurate as a starting point but requires significant qualification. The prohibition on prior restraints is nearly absolute under modern doctrine, while post-publication liability is calibrated by the nature of the plaintiff and the subject matter. Bouvier's treatment predates this entire doctrinal structure.
The parchment sense appears in English practice treatises and early procedural commentaries. Researchers working with pre-nineteenth-century English records may encounter the term in this physical sense. It has no relevance to modern practice.
Historical Dictionary Support
The historical sources agree on the two primary senses — parchment roll and publishing institution — but handle them with varying depth. Black's (both editions) preserves the archaic procedural meaning faithfully and briefly gestures at the constitutional meaning through the phrase "liberty of the press." Bouvier provides the most substantive treatment of the publishing rights sense, framing press freedom in terms of individual liberty to publish combined with liability for abuse. This framing reflects the nineteenth-century understanding: press freedom was essentially freedom from prior restraint, with robust post-publication liability remaining available. Anderson directs researchers to the LIBERTY entry rather than developing the term independently. Burrill's entry as reproduced in the source material appears to include extraneous text — the language about "a process of reasoning from one fact to another" describes presumption, not press, and should be treated as a source artifact rather than substantive authority.
None of the historical dictionaries anticipates the institutional press as a subject of distinct constitutional rights, reporter's privilege doctrine, or access-to-government claims. These are twentieth- and twenty-first-century developments that historical dictionaries cannot address.
Jurisdictional Note
The First Amendment Press Clause applies directly only to federal action and to state action through incorporation. State constitutions frequently contain independent press-freedom guarantees that may be more protective than federal doctrine. Shield law protection for journalists varies widely by state — some states provide absolute privilege, others qualified privilege, and a few provide none by statute. Federal courts have not recognized a First Amendment reporter's privilege of uniform scope.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Freedom of the Press — Shield Laws, Source Protection, and Press Access (The Law Mind Constitutional Law Encyclopedia)
Freedom of the Press — Prior Restraints, Reporter's Privilege, and Access Rights (The Law Mind Constitutional Law Encyclopedia)