Riders shove man shouting racial slurs off Brooklyn subway, throw soup on him

Anyone who invokes the supposed "fighting words" exception as a justification for curbing offensive speech is basically admitting that he/she has no actual understanding of First Amendment case law. Ken White over at the legal blog Popehat has a phenomenal article debunking some of the most popular misconceptions about free speech exceptions, though I'll just quote his section about the "fighting words" trope:

Trope Seven: "Fighting words"

Example: "There are two exceptions from the constitutional right to free speech – defamation and the doctrine of “fighting words” or “incitement,” said John Szmer, an associate professor of political science and a constitutional law expert at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte." McClatchy.com, May 4, 2015.

No discussion of controversial speech is complete without some idiot suggesting that it may be "fighting words."

In 1942 the Supreme Court held that the government could prohibit "fighting words" — "those which by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace." The Supreme Court has been retreating from that pronouncement ever since. If the "fighting words" doctrine survives — that's in serious doubt — it's limited to face-to-face insults likely to provoke a reasonable person to violent retaliation. The Supreme Court has rejected every opportunity to use the doctrine to support restrictions on speech. The "which by their very utterance inflict injury" language the Supreme Court dropped in passing finds no support whatsoever in modern law — the only remaining focus is on whether the speech will provoke immediate face-to-face violence.

That's almost always irrelevant to the sort of speech at issue when the media invokes the trope.

Pro-censorship types here on Reddit have this weird fetish where they think that derelict laws and legal precedents can simply be revived by invoking them when convenient and simply omitting whether or not those laws have ever been applied or the precedent has changed. Unless you want to make a total fool out of yourself in an American court of law, invoking the "fighting words" doctrine carries as much weight in present-day jurisprudence as the "separate but equal" standard established by Plessy v. Ferguson - none at all.

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