From: sethb@fid.morgan.com (Seth Breidbart)
Subject: Re: Hate Speech Okay, says the Supreme Court
Organization: my opinions only
Date: Tue, 21 Jul 1992 21:10:08 GMT

In article <1992Jul15.003025.25925@Princeton.EDU>
egnilges@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Ed Nilges) writes:
>In article <1992Jul14.232833.12548@fid.morgan.com> sethb@fid.morgan.com (Seth Breidbart) writes:

>>Americans such as myself believe in freedom of speech.  I think Ed
>>Nilges has the right to express his opinions.  I don't agree with them
>>or approve of them, but he has the right to express them.
>
>...until he pisses Seth off enough, or America goes to war,or ...

Well, Ed, you piss me off plenty; have you seen me try to restrict
your freedom of speech?  (Don't tell me I can't; I know how to forge
cancels.)

>From William L. Prosser's "Handbook of the Law of Torts", West
>Publishing Company (St. Paul MN), 1971:
>
>     p. 38:"Any act of such a nature as to excite an apprehension
>     of a battery may constitute an assault.  It is an assault to
                   ^^^
>     shake a fist under another's nose, to aim or strike at him
>     with a weapon, to hold it in a threatening position, to rise
>     or advance to strike another, to surround him with a display
>     of force, to chase him in a hostile manner, or to lean over a
>     woman's bed and make indecent proposals, in such a way as to
>     put her in fear."

Note that _all_ of the examples given require that the assaulter is
within easy physical attacking distance of the victim.  ("To aim... a
weapon" may be done from some distance, but presumably within the
range of the weapon.)  Burning a cross on someone else's lawn might be
assault; on your own lawn, it need not.  If I burn a cross on my lawn
(if I had a lawn), who am I assaulting?  Name the victim.  Assault is
not a victimless crime.

>The key to assault, according to Prosser, is that it creates a
>reasonable expectation of harm.

The key word is "reasonable".

>  And I find no reference to the need for
>an assault to be made by someone in the presence of the victim.

Well, a certain net.idiot threatened (in email) to beat me up.  Is
that assault?  (Hint: He's 2500 miles away.)

>  After
>all, cross burnings first occured in the Reconstruction period in the
>South following its defeat in the War of the Rebellion, and they were
>intended to create a great deal of apprehension on the part of newly
>enfranchised Southern black people.

Thus, some cross burnings were threats.

>  Cross burnings were preludes to
>lynchings and (during the civil rights struggles of the Sixties) to the
>firebombing of churches.

So were some others.

Now, prove they all are.  (Hint: you can't.)

>  The fact that my assaulter is a blasted coward
>should not, in my opinion, excuse him from my suing his butt off.

If you know that he is a coward, how reasonable is your expectation of
harm?

>Jack Campin was merely (from his relatively neutral position in Glasgow)
>observing that a cross burning is more an assault than a statement about
>politics.

That depends on who's burning the cross, and why.

>  Put yourself in the position of Viktora's victims, a black
>family forced to move because of this assault.

Agreed, this particular case may have been assault.

Consider cross-burning to be equivalent to the words "niggers get
out".  If Viktora had spray-painted that on his victim's house, it
would constitute trespass, vandalism, assault, etc.  If he wrote those
same words as a letter to the editor (say, of the KKK newsletter),
would those words automatically constitute assault?  Suppose those
words were the title of a book on racism.  Are they still assault?

Seth		sethb@fid.morgan.com
Xref: sparky talk.politics.misc:35057 alt.politics.clinton:154