David L. Hudson Jr., ABA Journal; When do rants exceed First Amendment boundaries and become true threats?
"True threats are not protected in part because of the fear and
disruption they cause in their recipients. “Speech that places a victim
in fear for his or her physical safety is deeply harmful in that it
disrupts the target’s life and may deter him or her from engaging in key
life activities,” says University of Colorado Law School professor
Helen Norton, who writes frequently on First Amendment topics.
“Indeed,
true threats may themselves undermine First Amendment values by
silencing the speaker’s target.” The push to combat threats is understandable. The problem is
discerning the boundaries between protected speech and unprotected true
threats. “The unclear part of the definition is what makes a threat
‘true,’ meaning that it is an expression dangerous enough for the
government to have the power to punish, and the definition is narrow
enough that it does not chill protected speech,” says Leslie Gielow
Jacobs, a First Amendment expert who teaches at the University of the
Pacific.
“We don’t want to criminalize political hyperbole, jokes or drunken
rants,” Norton explains. “Not infrequently, we say extreme things that
we don’t mean to be understood literally, such as ‘I am so mad at X that
I could kill him.’ Speech of that sort furthers an individual’s First
Amendment interests in expressive autonomy, and the government’s
regulation of it threatens overreaching and other dangers.”"
Issues and developments related to ethics, information, and technologies, examined in the ethics and intellectual property graduate courses I teach at the University of Pittsburgh School of Computing and Information. My Bloomsbury book "Ethics, Information, and Technology" will be published in Summer 2025. Kip Currier, PhD, JD
Showing posts with label political hyperbole. Show all posts
Showing posts with label political hyperbole. Show all posts
Tuesday, August 7, 2018
When do rants exceed First Amendment boundaries and become true threats?; ABA Journal, August 2018
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