CHAPLINSKY v. NEW HAMPSHIRE, 315 U.S. 568

Summary

Appellant was convicted under a New Hampshire statute, N.H. Pub. Laws ch. 378, § 2, for using offensive language towards another person in public. Appellant contended that the statute was invalid under U.S. Const. amend. XIV because it placed an unreasonable restraint on freedom of speech and because it was vague and indefinite. In affirming the lower court's decision, the court noted that there were certain well-defined and narrowly limited classes of speech, the prevention and punishment of which had never been thought to raise any Constitutional problem, such as "fighting" words. The lower court declared that the statute's purpose was to preserve public peace, and in appellant's case, the forbidden words were those that had a direct tendency to cause acts of violence. Furthermore, the word "offensive" was not defined in terms of what a particular addressee thought, it was defined as what reasonable men of common intelligence understood as words likely to cause an average addressee ...