1/ I love how right wingers responded to my post earlier (about the arrest of UCONN students for shouting racial slurs) by saying their speech was protected and my claim to the contrary was a "bad legal take." Yet they ignored my argument, which followed existing precedent...
2/ The important decisions are Chaplinsky which set forth the fighting words doctrine and the Virginia v Black decision. In the first, the court held that certain words had such little value outside of their intention to provoke, as to not be protected. Admittedly, since then...
3/ The court has applied this standard inconsistently and so it's hard to know if the CT law that was applied here would be upheld. I was arguing it should be, but I know it could go either way. I made an argument for why it should, which critics ignored of course...
4/ And then Virginia v Black held that certain racist hate speech CAN be prohibited if it can be shown it was intended to intimidate. Again, that's up to the court to decide, case by case, but the point is, to claim there are NO restrictions on allowed speech is simply wrong...
5/ The restriction cannot be merely content based, but it CAN BE APPLIED when the act is aimed at intimidating others...It's not my legal take here that is bad, it's those who claimed it was but haven't actually researched the law...
Here's a piece I wrote about this a while back (sadly never did finish parts 3 and 4, but I will soon) medium.com/@timjwise/free…
applying the argument I make in this piece to the UCONN case, because the students were loudly saying the n-word, in a way they had to know would be heard, the courts could quite possibly find they did this to intimidate and cause fear. anger, anxiety, etc...
as such, they could apply the Virginia v Black precedent since the punishment would be based on the manner of the articulated hate speech, not merely content. Personally I think slurs should satisfy the fighting words doctrine alone, but I know that is not existing jurisprudence
my initial tweets were a combo of philosophical and legal argument without regard for existing law (i.e. more about what should be rather than what is the current law) AND arguments in keeping with the precedents in Chaplinsky and Virginia v Black. I want to see it litigated
