The Supreme Court on Monday made it harder for prosecutors to convict those who make violent statements on Facebook and other social media, saying it is not enough that an ordinary person would find the rants threatening.

In its first examination of the murky rules regarding conduct on the Internet, the court moved cautiously while throwing out the conviction of a Pennsylvania man whose postings, delivered in rap-lyric style, suggested killing his estranged wife, federal law enforcement officials and even a kindergarten class.

The narrow opinion said it was not necessary to address whether the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech protected Elonis’s Facebook statements. The opinion also declined to take a position on whether it would be enough for a conviction to show that a defendant had been reckless in making inflammatory statements, as Alito proposed.

Paraphrasing the famous holding from Marbury v. Madison that it is the court’s prerogative to say what the law is, Alito said the court was announcing, “It is emphatically the prerogative of this court to say only what the law is not.”

Intrigue, duplicity, back-stabbing, and character assassination. Think it sounds like American politics today?

Try the 1790s, a decade that saw Thomas Paine–famous pamphleteer for the revolutionary cause–denounce President George Washington as a “hypocrite in public life” for signing a treaty with England. And earlier in the same decade, you’ll find the recently retired secretary of state, Thomas Jefferson, telling his crony James Madison to get busy destroying the good name of Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton. Yes, the same Hamilton whom Madison had collaborated with only a few years before in writing the famous articles in support of the Constitution.

And back-stabbing? Well, there’s the fine case of Ben Franklin penning a secret missive to Congress accusing fellow emissary John Adams of behavior “improper and unbecoming” for refusing to truckle to ally France’s every whim. Not nasty enough? Try Vice President Jefferson telling a French diplomat that President Adams is “a vain, irritable, stubborn” man. Given such a climate of slander and treachery, should we be surprised at the 1804 duel between the vice president of the United States and the former secretary of the Treasury, a duel in which the latter was killed?

Americans who think they live in politically divisive times might do well to look back at the first decades of their republic’s history.

Well not all 10 are great. But all of these interactive maps will help you understand the convoluted process.

Can a democratic system function efficiently in an advanced economy in our modern, globalized world? A system based, say, on a couple of 18^th century documents updated occasionally by nine people in black robes and a two-chambered legislature that must devote at least as much time to the raising of funds to re-elect itself? I think it can—eventually—but not everyone agrees.

Here are a few things the framers did not know about: World War II. DNA. Sexting. Airplanes. The atom. Television. Medicare. Collateralized debt obligations. The germ theory of disease. Miniskirts. The internal combustion engine. Computers. Antibiotics. Lady Gaga.

People on the right and left constantly ask what the framers would say about some event that is happening today. What would the framers say about whether the drones over Libya constitute a violation of Article I, Section 8, which gives Congress the power to declare war? Well, since George Washington didn’t even dream that man could fly, much less use a global-positioning satellite to aim a missile, it’s hard to say what he would think. What would the framers say about whether a tax on people who did not buy health insurance is an abuse of Congress’s authority under the commerce clause? Well, since James Madison did not know what health insurance was and doctors back then still used leeches, it’s difficult to know what he would say. (Time)

The issue before the court is not whether the FCC can regulate obscenity. It can. The issue is whether the FCC can regulate “indecency,” as defined in a seminal 1978 case about a daytime radio broadcast of George Carlin’s “Filthy Words” monologue as “language that describes, in terms patently offensive as measured by contemporary community standards for the broadcast medium, sexual or excretory activities and organs” between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m., when children might be watching.

“Respondents are two establishments in South Bend, Indiana, that wish to provide totally nude dancing as entertainment, and individual dancers who are employed at these establishments. They claim that the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of expression prevents the State of Indiana from enforcing its public indecency law to prevent this form of dancing. We reject their claim.”

Read this Supreme Court decision written by Chief Justice Rehnquist.

In 1789, the United States sought to make the union more perfect, drawing up 10 amendments to the Constitution now known as the Bill of Rights. In this series of ten short videos, TIME brings to life the words of the Founding Fathers and explores how these deeply felt ideas about liberty and property have evolved into the amendments as we interpret them today.