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Annotation 18 - First Amendment - FindLaw
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Fighting Words and Other Threats to the Peace .--In Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire, 95 the Court unanimously sustained a conviction under a statute proscribing ''any offensive, derisive, or annoying word'' addressed to any person in a public place under the state court's interpretation of the statute as being limited to ''fighting words''-- i.e., to ''words . . . [which] have a direct tendency to cause acts of violence by the person to whom, individually, the remark is addressed.'' The statute was sustained as ''narrowly drawn and limited to define and punish specific conduct lying within the domain of state power, the use in a public place of words likely to cause a breach of the peace.'' 96 The case is best known for Justice Murphy's famous dictum. ''[I]t is well understood that the right of free speech is not absolute at all times and under all circumstances. There are certain well-defined and narrowly limited classes of speech, the prevention and punishment of which have never been thought to raise any Constitutional problem. These include the lewd and obscene, the profane, the libelous, and the insulting or 'fighting' words--those which by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace. It has been well observed that such utterances are no essential part of any exposition of ideas, and are of such slight social value as a step to truth that any benefit that may be derived from them is clearly outweighed by the social interest in order and morality.'' 97
Chaplinsky still remains viable for the principle that ''the States are free to ban the simple use, without a demonstration of additional justifying circumstances, of so-called 'fighting words,' those personally abusive epithets which, when addressed to the ordinary citizen, are, as a matter of common knowledge, inherently likely to provoke violent reaction.'' 98 But, in actuality, the Court has closely scrutinized statutes on vagueness and overbreadth grounds and set aside convictions as not being within the doctrine. Chaplinsky thus remains formally alive but of little vitality. 99
On the obverse side, the ''hostile audience'' situation, the Court once sustained a conviction for disorderly conduct of one who refused police demands to cease speaking after his speech seemingly stirred numbers of his listeners to mutterings and threatened disorders. 100 But this case has been significantly limited by cases which hold protected the peaceful expression of views which stirs people to anger because of the content of the expression, or perhaps because of the manner in which it is conveyed, and that breach of the peace and disorderly conduct statutes may not be used to curb such expression.
The cases are not clear to what extent the police must go in protecting the speaker against hostile audience reaction or whether only actual disorder or a clear and present danger of disorder will entitle the authorities to terminate the speech or other expressive conduct. 101 Neither, in the absence of incitement to illegal action, may government punish mere expression or proscribe ideas, 102 regardless of the trifling or annoying caliber of the expression. 103
Group Libel, Hate Speech .--In Beauharnais v. Illinois, 104 relying on dicta in past cases, 105 the Court upheld a state group libel law which made it unlawful to defame a race or class of people. The defendant had been convicted under this statute after he had distributed a leaflet, a part of which was in the form of a petition to his city government, taking a hard-line white supremacy position and calling for action to keep African Americans out of white neighborhoods. Justice Frankfurter for the Court sustained the statute along the following reasoning. Libel of an individual, he established, was a common-law crime and was now made criminal by statute in every State in the Union. These laws raise no constitutional difficulty because libel is within that class of speech which is not protected by the First Amendment. If an utterance directed at an individual may be the object of criminal sanctions, no good reason appears to deny a State the power to punish the same utterances when they are directed at a defined group, ''unless we can say that this is a willful and purposeless restriction unrelated to the peace and well-being of the State.'' 106 The Justice then reviewed the history of racial strife in Illinois to conclude that the legislature could reasonably fear substantial evils from unrestrained racial utterances. Neither did the Constitution require the State to accept a defense of truth, inasmuch as historically a defendant had to show not only truth but publication with good motives and for justifiable ends. 107 ''Libelous utterances not being within the area of constitutionally protected speech, it is unnecessary . . . to consider the issues behind the phrase 'clear and present danger.''' 108
Beauharnais has little continuing vitality as precedent. Its holding, premised in part on the categorical exclusion of defamatory statements from First Amendment protection, has been substantially undercut by subsequent developments, not the least of which are the Court's subjection of defamation law to First Amendment challenge and its ringing endorsement of ''uninhibited, robust, and wide-open'' debate on public issues in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan. 109 In R. A. V. v. City of St. Paul, the Court, in an opinion by Justice Scalia, explained and qualified the categorical exclusions for defamation, obscenity, and fighting words. These categories of speech are not ''entirely invisible to the Constitution,'' but instead ''can, consistently with the First Amendment, be regulated because of their constitutionally proscribable content.'' 110 Content discrimination unrelated to that ''distinctively proscribable content'' runs afoul of the First Amendment. Therefore, the city's bias-motivated crime ordinance, interpreted as banning the use of fighting words known to offend on the basis of race, color, creed, religion, or gender, but not on such other possible bases as political affiliation, union membership, or homosexuality, was invalidated for its content discrimination. ''The First Amendment does not permit [the city] to impose special prohibitions on those speakers who express views on disfavored subjects.''
- See more at: Annotation 18 - First Amendment - FindLaw
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