Viewed 25k times. Conversely, if you yell it and people do nothing then what might be the charge? Improve this question. Randy Zeitman Randy Zeitman 1 1 gold badge 1 1 silver badge 6 6 bronze badges. Even if the endangerment is the crime, the only act causing the endangerment is the shouting.
Consider the question "If you pull a trigger and cause a bullet to fly through the air and kill someone then wouldn't the killing be the crime? There might be a fire, then its a good thing. Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. It specifically rules on the limitation of freedom of speech first amendment : The original ruling is this: The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic.
Commentary If these instances are correct then it would seem clear that Freedom of Speech is being honored as it's the result of speech, not the speech itself, that could be an offense.
Improve this answer. Free Radical Free Radical 2, 12 12 silver badges 27 27 bronze badges. The ruling says nothing about the lawfulness of shouting "fire" in the theater, only that someone facing charges for having done so would be unable to rely on a first amendment defense.
Point taken. Amended answer. I am saying the first amendment is not involved. No one is going to be charged for improper speaking and using the first amendment for defense is superfluous. I believe you can yell fire in a crowded theater without charge if nothing happens perhaps including that one paid to get in the theater. I've yelled "Fire" in a crowded theater.
I was on stage and it was my line. Each case involved a violation of the Espionage Act of , which essentially made it punishable to do anything that interfered with U. Schenck , the U. It was not a high point in American jurisprudence. What Holmes said after it, however, did become a standard for future free speech arguments. For the next 50 years, clear and present danger was the accepted—and slightly vague—metric for discerning if spoken or printed material was protected speech.
Then, in , the Supreme Court replaced it with something clearer. On December 30, , the Iroquois Theater in Chicago burned. During a weekday matinee of a musical, a spark from a light caught a stage curtain. Actors on the stage tried to calm the crowd, which was largely women and children, but they failed.
The crowd panicked, and at the end of it, more than men, women, and children had died, died from the flames, died from smoke, died from being trampled or pressed to death in a desperate rush to get out. I talk to him about how common these fires were and how they played on the minds of the public in this time period.
Nat Brandt: Take the Iroquois Theater, for example, an absolutely new theater. It opened up in November of that year and this was December now. They were kept locked. They were still being worked on. There were so many things that were omitted. I mean you name it and it went wrong. Ken White: The fear, the visceral horror of these fires helped drive the casualties, because people reacted to the fires with sheer deadly panic.
Nat Brandt: Well, the ushers, all of whom were teenagers, there was no fire drill for the ushers; what they should do, where they should lead people, and there were certainly no signs pointing as to where the exits were.
So yeah, it was just madness. Ken White: So today, in , when we read the analogy, this speech is like shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic, we mostly think of how trite the phrase is.
I think to get the same emotional response now you might have to use the analogy, this speech is like shouting he has got a gun at a school. But was different than Michael Kazin: When there were revolutions happening, when the Schenck case was decided, actually in , after the war had ended, a few months afterwards, there were revolutions in Germany, attempted ones in Italy, in China; was a year sort of like , which is what people are talking about a lot these days, where revolutionary movements and revolutions seemed to be popping up everywhere.
So there was a real fear that that would happen in the United States as well. In Seattle, there was a general strike which shutdown the city and some people talked about the Seattle Soviet, where workers would run the city and maybe go on to run the state and maybe even try to run the government itself.
So this was a tumultuous time and the government crackdowns were I think popular among most Americans, because they were afraid that America would be changed to a beyond recognition. Ken White: Fear drives censorship. Ultimately, it was just a florid way to say that the First Amendment is not absolute. But what does it mean today, in ?
What does it mean when people repeat it to support some restriction on free speech or on other rights? What legal weight does it have? It really means absolutely nothing. Your reaction would be yes, thank you, I am aware, but the question is, what is that animal? We have the tools we need to decide what that animal is on the side of the road. With free speech those tools are a years of Supreme Court cases. Back in Episode 5, I talked about the case, United States v. Stevens, the Crush Videos case.
I am still hearing from some of you about the sound effects on that one. That was such a sordid little case, but so important. It was important because the Supreme Court used it to explain how we go about answering this question. Now that we have agreed that not all speech is protected, is this particular speech we are talking about protected? The answer is that first we start with a presumption that a law punishing speech for its content or message or subject matter violates the First Amendment.
Holmes' quote has become a crutch for every censor in America, yet the quote is wildly misunderstood. The latest example comes from New York City councilmen Peter Vallone , who declared yesterday "Everyone knows the example of yelling fire in a crowded movie theater," as he called for charges against pseudonymous Twitter ComfortablySmug for spreading false information during Hurricane Sandy.
Other commentators have endorsed Vallone's suggestions , citing the same quote as established precedent. In the last few years, the quote has reared its head on countless occasions. In September, commentators pointed to it when questioning whether the controversial anti-Muslim video should be censored. Before that, it was invoked when a crazy pastor threatened to burn Qurans.
Before that, the analogy was twisted to call for charges against WikiLeaks for publishing classified information. The list goes on. But those who quote Holmes might want to actually read the case where the phrase originated before using it as their main defense. If they did, they'd realize it was never binding law, and the underlying case, U.
Schenck, is not only one of the most odious free speech decisions in the Court's history, but was overturned over 40 years ago. First, it's important to note U.
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