52 4.2 Speaking Freely and ethically
required not only that he listen to her but also that she listen to him. “You should
let me finish my sentence,” Obama admonished.^3 Even during this moment of
confrontation—a moment in which one might question the heckler’s ethics—the
president defended the right of both parties to free speech. For more than
200 years in the United States, entities as varied as state legislatures, colleges
and universities, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the federal courts have
sought to define through both law and public policy the phrase freedom of speech.Free Speech and the U.S. Constitution
In 1791, the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was written to guarantee
that “Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech.” Only
a few years after the ratification of the First Amendment, however, Congress
passed the Sedition Act, providing punishment for those who spoke out against
the government. The act was allowed to lapse after both Thomas Jefferson and
James Madison declared it unconstitutional.Free Speech in the Twentieth Century
During World War I, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that it was lawful to restrict
speech that presented “a clear and present danger” to the nation. This decision
led to the founding, in 1920, of the American Civil Liberties Union, the first or-
ganization formed to protect free speech. In 1940, Congress declared it illegal to
urge the violent overthrow of the federal government. However, even as they
heard the hate speech employed by Hitler and the Nazis, U.S. courts and law-
makers argued that only by protecting free speech could the United States pro-
tect the rights of minorities and the disenfranchised. For most of the last half of
the twentieth century, the U.S. Supreme Court continued to protect rather than
to limit free speech, upholding it as “the core aspect of democracy.”^4
In 1964, the Supreme Court narrowed the definition of slander, or false
speech that harms someone. The Court ruled that before a public official can
recover damages for slander, he or she must prove that the slanderous statement
was made with “actual malice.”^5 Another boost for free speech occurred in 1964,
not in the courts but on a university campus. In December of that year, more
than one thousand students at the University of California in Berkeley took over
three floors of Sproul Hall to protest the recent arrest of outspoken student ac-
tivists. The Berkeley Free Speech Movement that arose from the incident per-
manently changed the political climate of U.S. college campuses. In a written
statement on the 30-year anniversary of the protest, Berkeley’s vice chancellor,
Carol Christ, wrote, “Today it is difficult to imagine life in a university where
there are serious restrictions on the rights of political advocacy.”^6
Free speech gained protection in the last two decades of the twentieth cen-
tury, during which the Supreme Court found “virtually all attempts to restrain
speech in advance... unconstitutional,” regardless of how hateful or disgusting