Opinion ID: 524995
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Values Which the First Amendment Embodies

Text: 95 As a method of adjudication, invalidating an entire rule as facially unconstitutional is certainly strong medicine. See Broadrick v. Oklahoma, 413 U.S. 601, 93 S.Ct. 2908, 2916, 37 L.Ed.2d 830 (1973) (attacking statute on its face using doctrine of substantial overbreadth). A court which utilizes such medicine should consider the patient's ailment and risks of the medicine carefully before administering the dosage. However, when the ailment appears to be fatal, strong medicine may be the best prescription for the patient. The health of the patient--freedom of speech--should be a court's primary focus. 96 Both action and restraint by a court integrally affect First Amendment values. Failure to administer strong medicine when it is called for may undermine First Amendment values just as legitimately striking down a rule will nourish those same values. Thus, in examining the legal doctrines which criss-cross the First Amendment, it is important to keep one's eye always on the underlying reasons for freedom of speech so that the doctrines are not rent from their foundations. 97 Traditionally, free speech is protected because it has values; it springs from the age of enlightment out of which the spirit of the American Revolution came. The values include truth-seeking and knowledge-advancement, as a societal object, as well as to a lesser degree perhaps, self-fulfillment on the part of the individual speaker [autonomy and individual dignity]. Oakes, Tolerance Theory and the First Amendment, 85 Mich.L.Rev. 1135, 1137 (1987). 98 Citizens in a democracy need to hear about problems that their government encounters. To assist people in making informed decisions, information must be made public for citizen deliberation. Purely political words are not the only words of truth and knowledge that the public needs or desires to hear. What is personal for one person is political for another. Thus, for the people to be able to judge for themselves the value or usefulness of particular speech, the people need to hear the actual words as spoken by the speaker, unfiltered and unabashed. Censorship spawns two great evils: distortion through the filtering of speech to conform with the censor's vision of truth and knowledge, and the chilling of potential speakers, especially the timorous who self-restrain valuable words from flowing with slight pressure from external sources. 99 In addition, there is also a crucial social role for the free speech principle in the context of the assumed reality of an impulse to intolerance. L. Bollinger, The Tolerant Society: Free Speech and Extremist Speech in America 106 (1986). Free speech provides a method of addressing a ubiquitous social incapacity, [the incapacity within all of us of intolerance]. Bollinger at 107; see Oakes at 1139. 100 Speech that an official deems worthy of suppression commonly tends to criticize the official or the governmental body in some way. Humans dislike self-directed criticism. The intolerance within all of us can oversuppress speech which is otherwise useful either to the speaker or to a listener. The desire to suppress unpleasant or critical speech is almost irrepressible. As a society, and as a judicial body within our society, we should attempt where legitimately possible to encourage self-restraint rather than intolerance in regard to speech. See L. Bollinger, The Tolerant Society: Free Speech and Extremist Speech in America, 243-45 (1986). 101 Professor Bollinger sees free speech as stand[ing] symbolically as the gateway to social intercourse. Id. at 238. American society has evolved with this principle according to Bollinger because it is a capitalist economic society, with pervasive bureaucratic and professional systems, where personal preferences tend to be submerged; because it is composed of large immigrant groups of many different cultures and religions; because it is stable with a relatively homogeneous two-party system not likely to be supplanted by splinter, deviant groups. The First Amendment has taken on meaning, he again reminds us, beyond merely preserving meritorious speech or preserving an area of freedom for each individual beyond the reach of the State, a meaning which can be seen in the context of extremist speech cases. The meaning is that free speech principles enable us to see the elements in our thinking that distort our judgment in drawing the lines that inevitably have to be drawn in a pluralistic society. Free speech is thus a means, as well as an end. Oakes, Tolerance Theory and the First Amendment, 85 Mich.L.Rev. 1135, 1143-44 (1987). 102 Fostering tolerance, one hopes, also renders the impulse to intolerance less attractive in other, nonspeech areas. Tolerance of speech has the effect of spilling over into other areas of our pluralistic society, encouraging tolerance between people concerning the differences among us. 103