Chapter 05 – Criminal Law and Procedure
concurrence, Justice Kennedy observed that it “is poignant but fundamental that
the flag protects those who hold it in contempt.” You may also wish to note that
Johnson produced a somewhat surprising alignment of Justices, with “liberal”
Justice Brennan and “conservative” Justice Scalia helping to comprise the
majority.
The dissenters in Johnson (Rehnquist, O’Connor, Stevens, and White) saw the
defendant’s flag-burning as, to use Chief Justice Rehnquist’s words, “the
equivalent of an inarticulate grunt or roar that, it seems fair to say, is most likely
to be indulged in not to express any particular idea, but to antagonize others.”
According to the dissenters, the Texas statute merely “deprived Johnson of only
one rather inarticulate symbolic form of protest–a form of protest that was
profoundly offensive to many–and left him with a full panoply of other symbols
and every conceivable form of verbal expression to express his deep disapproval
of national policy.” The Chief Justice noted that Johnson had marched through
the city streets, conducted a rally in front of City Hall, engaged in a “die-in”
protest of nuclear weapons, and chanted various slogans during the march (e.g.,
“Reagan, Mondale, which will it be? Either one means World War III;” and “red,
white and blue, we spit on you, you stand for plunder, you will go under”).
What do your students think? Would our society be significantly less free if the
Johnsons of the world were denied this form of expression? Or would such a
decision be the first step down a “slippery slope” that would end in more serious
erosion of liberty?
R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul, 505 U.S. 377 (1992): The Supreme Court holds that the
First Amendment is violated by an ordinance that bans cross-burning and other
displays of symbols on property when the cross-burner (or symbol-displayer)
“knows or has reasonable grounds to know arouses anger, alarm or resentment in
others on the basis of race, color, creed, religion or gender.”
Points for Discussion: In Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire, 315 U.S. 568 (1942), the
Supreme Court held that “fighting words”–words that by their very utterance
inflict injury or tend to incite immediate violence–fall outside the First
Amendment’s protective umbrella. The scope of the fighting words classification
has never been very clear. In R.A.V., the Court accepted the lower court’s limiting
construction of the St. Paul ordinance at issue. Under this limiting construction,
the ordinance was deemed to be limited to reaching expressive conduct that
effectively amounted to fighting words. The lower court had concluded that the
ordinance thus restricted only unprotected expressive conduct and that the First
Amendment therefore was not violated. The Supreme Court, however, held that
even if the ordinance reached only the equivalent of fighting words, the First
Amendment was still violated. The violation stemmed, according to the majority,
from the city’s having chosen to single out and criminalize–on the basis of
content–certain expressive conduct amounting to fighting words while leaving
other fighting words (or equivalent expressive conduct) uncriminalized. In other
words, the majority concluded that the category of fighting words, though often
said to be unprotected by the First Amendment, is not wholly outside the First
Amendment, because the government cannot selectively impose adverse
consequences on certain expression within that category on the basis of content.
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