How does the Supreme Court analyze free speech and press issues today?

0:04Speech is a complicated human endeavor. Unsurprisingly, the legal rules surrounding speech are complicated too. You might think of at least three questions that arise. One is when is speech unprotected just because it's so dangerous or so harmful? Here's a classic example. True threats of violence. Somebody comes up to you and a dark Alley says your money or your life. Let's say they don't even take your money, they don't even show you a gun. They just say that. That's not protected by the First Amendment. That's a true threat of violence or a true threat of illegal conduct is constitutionally unprotected. Another famous example is defamation, which is generally speaking, knowingly false statements about particular people that damage their reputations. If somebody says, Eugene Volokh is an embezzler.

0:57Especially if they know that's not true, and I assure you it's not true, then I could sue them for slander, if they say it orally, libel, if they say it in writing. Those are a couple of examples. Child pornography is another example. There are some others as well.

1:13Those are pretty narrow exceptions. Generally speaking, speech is protected unless it falls within one of those narrow exceptions. For example, there's no exception for so called hate speech. You can express whatever views you want, including about race, religion, sex, sexual orientation. Those are protected by the First Amendment.

1:31There's no exception, but a second thing that sometimes comes up is when speech is restricted, not because of its content, not because of what it says, but because of other features. Let's say, for example, there's a law that says, you can't use loud speakers in residential neighborhoods at night. Does that restrict speech?

1:53Yes. If I want to have big demonstration at midnight in a residential neighborhood using loud speakers, I'm not allowed to do that but generally speaking, a lot of those so called content neutral restrictions are constitutionally permissive. Another example might be, you can demonstrate in front of a building if there may be 10, 20, 30 of you, but if you want to have a demonstration of 1,000 people, you might need a permit, especially if you want to have it on a street because after all streets are usually dicken up for by traffic. That's an example of where you could have speech restrictions when they're content neutral. Though in the rules they're a little. The third category of restrictions that are often permissible is when the government is acting in special capacities for example, as an educator in kindergarten through 12th grade schools.

2:47There are certain restrictions the government can impose on students in school on pain of being maybe expelled or suspended or whatever else, that it can't impose on the rest of us on pain of being thrown in prison. Likewise, the government as employer can impose restrictions on its employees in some measure, especially when just says, look if you say certain things, then we'll stop paying you.

3:12The government as property owner has some extra rights over its property that it may not have over the property of the residents. Those are three elements of free speech law. You might think of as the gram of free speech law. There just as there are parts of speech into which we divide words, there are particular restrictions that we might identify this way. As a result, not all speech is protected all the time in all circumstances against all laws. This having been said, the speech protection we enjoy under American law really is very broad.