| Atticus Grinch |
04-11-2012 05:31 PM |
Re: The Wire
Quote:
Originally Posted by taxwonk
(Post 467927)
I don't believe this is true. Free speech rights are about the speaker's right to speak. That is considered a virtue in part because a well-informed polity will theoretically do a better job of self-governing. But, far more than anything else, free speech rights are about the ability of a citizen to air his grievances.
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That's what the petition clause is for. Smarter people than I -- though by no means necessarily smarter than you -- have said that the "right to hear" is the best way to understand and stop being made angry by SCOTUS jurisprudence in this area, because (for example) a corporation's right to speech is meaningless unless you understand the First Amendment instead being a right to hear what a corporation has to say, even if the government has a reason it doesn't think you should hear it. Same with the "money=speech" cases. It even explains why the Supreme Court allows greater limitations on speech in schools and public workplaces. Because it's less about whether you have a right to speak -- obviously, you do, you can do in in your fucking bedroom for all the government cares -- and more about whether the regulation at issue interferes with your right to hear what the speaker has to say, if you seek it out. It's also why "chilling effect" theory looks not at whether the individual speaker was deterred, but whether a reasonable speaker might be deterred by the regulation being challenged. Through this lens, public forum/private forum cases all seem more rational.
Of course, the troubling thing for this theory is that it's hard to get "listener standing" in an overbreadth challenge because of the way the SCOTUS has framed Article III standing. But the reason we punish state actors who punish speakers is because of the perceived harm to the potential listeners. |
