4 ms·

What about yelling "fire!" in a crowded theater?

• Akronymus 3y ago
  Risk of imminent harm due to panic. Fundamentally different from saying something and someone deciding to act based on that a while after hearing/reading it.
  • aae42 3y ago
    I'm not so sure it's fundamentally different. I've been seeing a lot of violence that, while premeditated, seems to very much trace back to speech causing panic.
• dpifke 3y ago
  That's a quote from Schenck v. United States which was decided in 1919, and overturned by Bandenburg v. Ohio in 1969. It's by no means the law (it came 150 years after the law was written), and it was never a particularly good analogy. Oliver Wendell Holmes was talking about handing out anti-war pamphlets as akin to "shouting fire in a crowded theatre" and thus ruled that the First Amendment didn't protect protests during wartime—a decision even today's most anti-free-speech advocates would probably disagree with. He later backtracked on it. Using "fire in a crowded theater" to justify suppressing speech is like quoting Pope Urban VIII as support for your argument that the sun revolves around the Earth.