But it wasn't until the 1960s that there were strong Supreme Court judgments on
freedom of speech and the first major ones came out of the civil rights
movement. And that's not unusual. In the first major Supreme Court
statement affirming freedom of speech was in 1964 it was Times V Sullivan
if you want to look it up. What happened was that the New York Times published an
ad by the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King, which condemned
a state of Alabama sheriff. A parciularly brutal racist sheriff.
Who was doing all kinds of horrible things and they ran an ad condemning him.
State of Alabama sued the New York Times for what's called seditious libel.
Practically every country in the world, I suspect Holland too, I haven't checked,
has a principle of seditious libel.
Seditious libel means you cannot assault the state with words.
And truth is no defense. Truth makes it a worse crime
because then it's even a greater assault.
As far as I know, every country I've looked that still has that law.
Britain, Canada, you know, you can check here.
And that's like a core attack on freedom of speech.
It means the state, you know, the king or the state, whatever it is,
cannot be attacked with words, you know? Well that was--
The United States had it too. It was shot down by the Supreme Court in 1964.
So you can assault the State with words.
You can criticize the state freely and that means any
state authority. And there were other cases and finally in 1969 there was
the most important case which said that-- essentially, it concluded that speech should
be free up to participation in eminent criminal activity.
So, for example, if you and I go into a store and you have a gun.
And we're planning to rob it and I say: "Shoot!"
That's not protected speech but anything kind of up to that should be
protected speech and this is very relevant to the case that you mentioned
because the case in question was the Ku Klux Klan.
A vicious, racist organization carrying out lynching of blacks and so on and they
were the ones who were protected by this; that their speech should be protected up
to participation in imminent criminal acts. As far as I know that's
the most strongest protection of freedom of speech that exists anywhere.
Actually, it's even beyond what the courts are now willing to accept.
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