Limitations Of Free Speech

Supreme Court decisions have upheld the idea that free speech is important and protected, but that it sometimes must be restricted. Schenk v. United States, 249 U.S. 47 (1919), is an important example of restricting free speech for the greater good of the country. During World War 1, Charles Schenk distributed Socialist Party of America propaganda to potential military draftees, urging them to oppose the draft, since he felt it constituted a violation of the Thirteenth Amendment against involuntary servitude. The court ruled against him, since his efforts created a situation that could undermine the safety of the country in a time of war. In the unanimous opinion, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. wrote that “when a nation is at war many

[…] The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent.” This set a precedent for judging when free speech is acceptable by whether or not it creates a clear and present danger to the public well-being. In other words, it is partially the government’s responsibility to prevent the misuse of free speech, when it is clearly harmful or creates a dangerous situation. Furthering that line of thinking is the outcome of Chaplinsky v. State of New Hampshire, 315 U.S. 568 (1942), which introduced the ‘fighting words’ doctrine, which limited free speech for the sake of social stability and preventing breaches of the peace. In November of 1941, Walter Chaplinsky was arrested and charged under a New Hampshire law that makes it illegal to use intentionally offensive speech, directed at others, in a public place (chap.

The Supreme Court case Yates v. United States, 354 U.S. 298 (1957) also helped define when free speech should be limited. In this case 14 people, members of the Communist Party USA in California, were charged with violating the Smith Act, but they argued that simply advocating a change in government wasn’t the same as actively attempting to overthrow the government. The Supreme Court ruled that the Smith Act did not prohibit “advocacy of forcible overthrow of the government as an abstract doctrine.” In other words, it wasn’t a violation of the first amendment to advocate doctrines, but it would be a violation to use free speech to advocate immediate calls to violent action. These three Supreme Court cases show a continuing theme of limiting freedom of speech when it is necessary for the prevention of harm to the general public, or in some cases, to the government, or both, and support the idea that free speech, as protected by the first amendment, has a certain limited scope and is