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The fighting words doctrine, in United States constitutional law, is a limitation to freedom of speech as protected by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. In 1942, the U.S. Supreme Court established the doctrine by a 9–0 decision in Chaplinsky v.
A speech code is any rule or regulation that limits, restricts, or bans speech beyond the strict legal limitations upon freedom of speech or press found in the legal definitions of harassment, slander, libel, and fighting words. Such codes are common in the workplace, in universities, [1] and in private organizations. The term may be applied to ...
During colonial times, English speech regulations were rather restrictive.The English criminal common law of seditious libel made criticizing the government a crime. Lord Chief Justice John Holt, writing in 1704–1705, explained the rationale for the prohibition: "For it is very necessary for all governments that the people should have a good opinion of it."
Restrictions on free speech are only permissible when the speech at issue is likely to produce a clear and present danger of a serious substantive evil that rises far above public inconvenience, annoyance, or unrest. [179] Justice William O. Douglas wrote for the Court that "a function of free speech under our system is to invite dispute. It ...
Fighting words, as defined by the Court, is speech that "tend[s] to incite an immediate breach of the peace" by provoking a fight, so long as it is a "personally abusive [word] which, when addressed to the ordinary citizen, is, as a matter of common knowledge, inherently likely to provoke a violent reaction". [38]
Kaye, a former United Nations Special Rapporteur on free speech issues, said: "You cannot on the one hand say, 'The media is the enemy of the people,' and at the same time say, 'It's the policy of ...
Some legal scholars (such as Tim Wu of Columbia University) have argued that the traditional issues of free speech—that "the main threat to free speech" is the censorship of "suppressive states", and that "ill-informed or malevolent speech" can and should be overcome by "more and better speech" rather than censorship—assumes scarcity of ...
The Supreme Court’s recent ruling that makes it harder to hold people responsible for harassment online could send a troubling symbolic message about free speech to institutions other than ...