The limits of free speech - I've been a First Amendment nut ever since reading Nat Hentoff's
book on free speech. But, man, this story is creepy: a male nurse (who posed as a woman online) stands charged of two counts of assisting suicide for giving advice on Internet chat rooms. From the NY Times: "
Online talk, suicides, and a thorny court case." Does this meet the "shouting 'fire' in a crowded theater" threshold? Um, not really.
1 comment:
And what threshold might that be? It can certainly be criminalized to shout fire in a crowded theater, and the shouter can be punished to the limit of the law. But if the First Amendment means what it says, no law may curtail, in advance, the freedom to act with such stupidity and to cause harm to those who panic over it. It's prior restraint that is not permitted. And as Hugo Black once observed: No law means no law.
Simple. No?
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