appeals court heard oral arguments in the CPUSA case on June 21–23, 1950. Judge Learned Hand considered the clear and present danger test, but his opinion adopted a balancing approach similar to that suggested in American Communications Association v. Douds. The defendants appealed the Second Circuit's decision to the Supreme Court in Dennis v. United States. The 6–2 decision was issued on June 4, 1951, and upheld Hand's decision. Chief Justice Fred Vinson's opinion stated that the First Amendment does not require that the government must wait "until the putsch is about to be executed, the plans have been laid and the signal is awaited" before it interrupts seditious plots. In his opinion, Vinson endorsed the balancing approach used by Judge Hand: Importance Following Schenck v. United States, "clear and present danger" became both a public metaphor for First Amendment speech and a standard test in cases before the Court where a United States law limits a citizen's First Amendment rights; the law is deemed to be constitutional if it can be shown that the language it prohibits poses a "clear and present danger". However, the "clear and present danger" criterion of the Schenck decision was replaced in 1969 by Brandenburg v. Ohio, and the test refined to determining whether the speech would provoke an "imminent lawless action". The vast majority of legal scholars have concluded that in writing the Schenck opinion, Justice Holmes never meant to replace the "bad tendency" test which had been established in the 1868 English case R. v. Hicklin and incorporated into American jurisprudence in the 1904 Supreme Court case U.S. ex rel. Turner v. Williams. This is demonstrated by the use of the word "tendency" in Schenck itself, a paragraph in Schenck explaining that the success of speech in causing the actual harm was not a prerequisite for conviction, and use of the bad-tendency test in the simultaneous Frohwerk v. United States and Debs v. United States decisions (both of which cite Schenck without using the words "clear and present danger"). However, a subsequent essay by Zechariah Chafee titled "Freedom of Speech in War Time" argued despite context that Holmes had intended to substitute clear and present danger for the bad-tendency standard a more protective standard of free speech. Bad tendency was a far more ambiguous standard where speech could be punished even in the absence of identifiable danger, and as such was strongly