A Lot More Comes into Focus When You Remove the Lens Cap: Why Proliferating New Technologies Make it Particularly Urgent for the Supreme Court to Abandon its Inside-Out Approach to Freedom of Speech, and Bring Obscenity, Fighting Words, and Group Libel Within the First Amendment

Authors

Eric M. Freedman, Maurice A. Deane School of Law at Hofstra UniversityFollow

Document Type

Article

Publication Title

Iowa Law Review

Publication Date

1996

Abstract

This article calls for an end to the doctrinal distinction between speech that is "inside" the First Amendment and that which is "outside" it.

By re-examining the premises underlying its vindication of the summary suppression of obscenity, and overruling the moribund yet still-mischievous cases of Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire, 315 U.S. 568 (1942) (denying First Amendment protection to "fighting words") and Beauharnais v. Illinois, 343 U.S. 250 (1952) (denying First Amendment protection to group libel), the Court would take an important step towards blunting a variety of modern threats to freedom of expression.

Otherwise we risk having a Ptolemaic proliferation of First Amendment "exceptions" overwhelm whatever core of "rule" may be left.

Recommended Citation

Eric M. Freedman, A Lot More Comes into Focus When You Remove the Lens Cap: Why Proliferating New Technologies Make it Particularly Urgent for the Supreme Court to Abandon its Inside-Out Approach to Freedom of Speech, and Bring Obscenity, Fighting Words, and Group Libel Within the First Amendment, 81 Iowa L. Rev. 883 (1996)
Available at: https://scholarlycommons.law.hofstra.edu/faculty_scholarship/1272