Survey: Where America stands on the First Amendment in 2023

  How we view – and how much some of us support – the First Amendment is changing, and all of us ought to be concerned.

  The change is not in the actual 45 words: Those remain the same, protecting our freedoms of religion, speech, press, assembly, and petition.

Golden nuggets for free-expression advocates in an unusual case

  The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Lozman v. City of Riviera Beach, Florida (17-21) has some golden nuggets for free-expression advocates even though at first glance the opinion might seem quite narrow. The case involved a carping critic of the local government who alleged that city officials concocted a comprehensive plan of retaliation against him, including arresting him at a public meeting after he had filed an earlier open-meetings lawsuit against them.

David L. Hudson Jr.: High Court reverses woman’s conviction for profanity uttered at store

  A Connecticut woman who uttered a slew of profanity at a store manager during a customer service dispute had her conviction reversed by the state high court. The Connecticut Supreme Court explained that context matters in determining whether an individuals’ verbal outburst qualifies as fighting words – defined as words that can cause the recipient to react immediately with violence.

  "Fighting words" remains one of those narrow, unprotected categories of speech that sometimes leads to breach-of-the-peace or disorderly conduct convictions. The U.S. Supreme Court first identified fighting words as an unprotected category in Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire (1942), defining them as “words that by their very utterance inflict injury or cause an immediate breach of the peace.” Later cases have all but interred the first part of the definition – “words that by their very utterance inflict injury” – but fighting words cases still abound based on the “immediate breach of the peace” definition.

Gene Policinski: Technology takes freedoms forward, law catches up

  As it made the quantum leap from parchment to paper through the electronic era to digital formats, First Amendment law on freedom of expression has lagged behind technology. Today, this delayed legal reaction is playing out once again with Twitter, Facebook and the World Wide Web.

  The 45 words that protect our religious liberty, freedoms of speech and press, and the rights of assembly and petition, adopted in 1791, begin with the phrase “Congress shall make no law….” And for more than a century, courts saw the First Amendment through that legal lens, as restricting only federal laws and actions.

  But beginning in the 1920s the U.S. Supreme Court started, case-by-case, to apply the First Amendment to the states through the due-process clause of the 14th Amendment. With an eye toward current controversies, it’s worth considering the meandering path in which we have regulated, or decided not to regulate, new media and the technology of providing information, entertainment and communication.