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The First Amendment Foundation is a highly visible and accessible source of authoritative information, expertise and assistance to the public and news media.Founded as a non-profit organization in 1984 by The Florida Press Association, the Florida Society of Newspapers Editors and the Florida Association of Broadcasters to ensure that public commitment and progress in the areas of free speech, free press, and open government do not become checked and diluted during Floridas changing times.

Floridas Sunshine Laws guarantee our right to open government, but government officials can get downright creative to keep their decision-making in the dark. Like the state agency that demanded $3,200 to copy a single page of a public record, or the city commissioner who accidentally dropped her government phone in the toilet after a reporter asked her to see her text messages. And of course, you, the taxpayer footed the $1.3 million legal tab to keep our Governor and his cabinet out of court over secret emails. Fortunately, we have the Florida First Amendment Foundation fighting on our side. I urge you to support the First Amendment Foundation and keep Florida government by the people, for the people and in the Sunshine.

Carl Hiaasen, Miami Herald columnist and author ofSkin Tight,Strip Tease, Skinny Dip, Nature Girl, Star Island,Bad Monkey, Razor Girl and many more.

Thepurpose of the First Amendment Foundation is to protect and advance the publics constitutional right to open government by providing education and training, legal aid and information services. Funding is based on voluntary contributions from various organizations and concerned individuals.

You know, the critical research of my book would not have been possible without access granted by law via Floridas longstanding Open Government laws. Without Sunshine, stories like the injustice I uncovered in Central Florida could not have come forward. The Florida First Amendment Foundation has been protecting your citizen right to know for the past 31 years. Support the First Amendment Foundation. Support Open Government. It pays dividends.

Gilbert King, February 2016. Pulitzer Prize winning author of Devil in the Grove Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America

Our actions get results. In the past year, we led a broad coalition of open government advocates anddefeated a billthat would have made it harder to hold agencies accountable for public records violations. In dozens of courthouses and government offices around the country, citizens with FAFs help won access to the recordsand meetings.

Still,our job has never been more challenging and,with your help, we will continue to fight efforts to erode Floridas long-standing tradition of open government.

Find out more about the First Amendment Foundation.

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First Amendment Foundation

Former Vermont governor and Democratic presidential candidateHoward Dean offered his flawed interpretation of the First Amendment last week during the Ann Coulter-Berkeley controversy. The schoolcancelled Coulter's scheduled appearanceon campus after they decided the conservative speaker would createtoo dangerous of an environment. They then re-invited her, but rescheduled her speech. Coulter insists she's coming on the original date - this Thursday.

Between all the back and forth, Dean defended Berkeley's initialdecision to nix the speech,tweeting that "hate speech" is not protected by the Constitution. Putting aside the fact that Dean thinks conservatism amounts to hate speech,Guy explained just howwrong Dean was - not to mention hypocritical.Dean once joked that Trump peddled drugs.

Instead of admitting his mistake and saving face, Dean is doubling down on his ridiculous tweet.

"It's actually true" the First Amendment does not protect hate speech, he said on MSNBC Sunday.

Sigh.

Again, this constitutional scholar was a governor and ran for president.

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Howard Dean Doubles Down on Misinterpretation of First Amendment - Townhall

Even after almost two days of experts attempting to explain it, Howard Deanapparently stilldoesnt understand how the First Amendmentworks.In fact, the former Vermont governorcited anirrelevant Supreme Court decision when doubling-downed on his argument thathate speech isnt protected by the Constitution. First, though, lets review the timeline of Deans mistake. Then lets see where he went wrong.

This whole thing started Thursday night, when he made this claim.

This references something awful Ann Coulterreportedly said in 2002: My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times Building.

Does it meet colloquial definitions of hate speech? No. Is it terrible? Yes. Is it Constitutionally protected? Yuuuuuuuuuup. So is hate speech, sadly. Thats what commentators tried to drill into Deans head. Politifact got in on it. So did Vices Sarah Jeong,and others.

One counterargument caught Deans attention, however. AFriday op-ed from UCLA law Professor Eugene Volokh. This constitutional scholar and First Amendment expert took pains to explain how Free Speech works. Whats moreimportant, and possibly useful to non-lawyers, is his explanation of fighting words. [Emphasis mine]

To be sure, there are some kinds of speech that are unprotected by the First Amendment. But those narrow exceptions have nothing to do with hate speech in any conventionally used sense of the term. For instance, there is an exception for fighting words face-to-face personal insults addressed to a specific person, of the sort that are likely to start an immediate fight. But this exception isnt limited to racial or religious insults, nor does it cover all racially or religiously offensive statements. Indeed, when the City of St. Paul tried to specifically punish bigoted fighting words, the Supreme Court held that this selective prohibition was unconstitutional (R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul (1992)), even though a broad ban on all fighting words would indeed be permissible.

He also pointed out other exceptions, like true threats of illegal conduct or incitement intended to and likely to produce imminent illegal conduct i.e., illegal conduct in the next few hours or maybe days, as opposed to some illegal conduct some time in the future. But the fighting words exception is key here because of how Dean later responded.

Howard Deana former presidential candidate, and long-time power player in Vermont politicstried to prove that hate speech isnt protected, but instead cited a Supreme Court case that absolutely has nothing to do with hate speech.

1942s Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire turned on fighting words. In a unanimousruling, justices upheld the conviction, under state law, of a man who used abusive language to provoke the listener to an act of violence.

From the holding:

2. The Court notices judicially that the appellations damned racketeer and damned Fascist are epithets likely to provoke the average person to retaliation, and thereby cause a breach of the peace.

Now this is where I may lose some of you. What about racial slurs? Yes, if someone hurls a bunch of insults in such a way as to provoke a fistfight, then its outside of the First Amendments protection.But it wouldnt be unprotectedbecause its a slur. Its unprotectedbecause it, specifically, would cause violence soon, if not here and now. Volokhs explanation must be repeated here: Fighting words are face-to-face personal insults addressed to a specific person, of the sort that are likely to start an immediate fight. It has nothing to do with the speech being bigoted. Its all to do with the immediate incitement to violence.

Volokh wrote a rebuttal essayto Deans second tweet on Saturday morning. One line sums it up.

So Chaplinsky doesnt hold that Hate speech is not protected by the first amendment.

And even after all that, heres the governors most recent tweet on the matter.

Its unclear if Deanhas read Volokhs rebuttal.

[Screengrab via MSNBC]

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.

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Howard Dean Doesn't Get That First Amendment Protects Ann Coulter's 'Hate Speech' - LawNewz

Police officers prepare to deploy a skirmish line after a student protest turned violent at UC Berkeley during a demonstration over right-wing speaker Milo Yiannopoulos, who was forced to cancel his talk, in Berkeley, California, U.S., February 1, 2017. Photo by Stephen Lam/Reuters

A legal brouhaha at the University of California, Berkeley over rescheduling conservative author Ann Coulters speech shines a spotlight on an unanswered question from a similar First Amendment trial in 1969.

University administrators announced on Wednesday that they could not accommodate Coulters April 27 event that the Young Americas Foundation, a national organization, paid $17,000 to support, citing concerns about public safety after recent violence on campus. On Thursday, the school offered to instead host her on May 2, but a lawyer representing conservative students who helped organize the event threatened to sue if university officials did not maintain the original date.

If UC Berkeley continues to insist on violating the constitutional rights of its students and our clients by marginalizing or banning Ms. Coulters speech, we will seek relief in federal court, lawyer Harmeet Dhillon wrote to the university.

You cant kill a fly with a sledgehammer when it comes to these constitutional rights. Dave Roland, the director of litigation at the Freedom Center of Missouri

The letter was met with even more resistance by the school, capping a tense week that put it at the center of a classic debate about whether liberals on the campus, who have a legacy of promoting free speech, can maintain their standards for conservatives. As some pundits latched onto this narrative, some even arguing that inviting Coulter was a deliberately divisive maneuver, a First Amendment lawyer in Missouri started to pay close attention.

Dave Roland, the director of litigation at the Freedom Center of Missouri, said that public universities do have discretion over which speakers they host, but the Constitution requires a few things: All approved speakers have to be treated equally, and any restrictions on the time, place and manner of the event have to be justified.

Moving the event to a quiet week before finals and to a venue that requires a shuttle, like Berkeley offered to do, could reduce the access students might have and may affect their right to hear Coulter speak, he said.

The school has got a really heavy burden to show why its justifiable, Roland said. You cant kill a fly with a sledgehammer when it comes to these constitutional rights.

But if Dhillon files a suit and the school continues to argue it was necessary to change the date in order to keep everyone safe, then such a case could address a hole in existing First Amendment litigation.

In 1969, students and faculty at Auburn University in Alabama requested that the chaplain Rev. William Sloane Coffin at Yale University come to speak on campus. Auburns president denied the request because Coffin had been convicted of conspiring to encourage draft evasion of the Vietnam War and, the president said, might advocate breaking the law.

The Fifth Circuit ruled that the president, even if his intentions were good, made the decision based on what he anticipated Coffin would say, which encompassed a violation of the student rights at a state university.

The right of the faculty and students to hear a speaker cannot be left to the discretion of the university president on a pick and choose basis, the opinion reads. [The president] was denying them their First Amendment right to hear the speaker.

However, the court did not address the presidents fear of violence.

There was no claim that the Reverend Coffins appearance would lead to violence or disorder or that the university would be otherwise disrupted, the ruling reads. There is no claim that [the president] could not regulate the time or place of the speech or the manner in which it was to be delivered.

This is exactly what Berkeley is testing.

In a public response to Dhillons threat on Friday, the schools lawyers reaffirmed that security, not speech, is why they made their decision, and that it offered the best it could, given time restraints.

Differences in the management of event security have nothing to do with the Universitys agreement or disagreement with the opinions of the speakers, the letter reads.

Dhillon reaffirmed her stance to the NewsHour on Sunday, saying unless the school accommodates Coulter on Thursday, she will file a lawsuit.

Roland said the school could use recent events, one involving a far-right speaker, as evidence to support its claim.

In February, the Berkeley canceled a speech with former Breitbart News editor and agitator Milo Yiannopoulos after people, some dressed in all black, interrupted a campus protest against him, throwing rocks, setting fires and breaking windows.

READ MORE: Trump suggests Berkeley could lose federal funds over violent protests at university

Pranav Jandhyala was attacked. Jandhyala is the president of BridgeCal, the local chapter of BridgeUSA, which is a group run by students to help blur party lines and had a hand in organizing Coulters speech.

Its a personal issue for me, said Jandhyala. I really wish the campus police would work to do their job to protect the community more and also protect free speech.

And on April 15, fights broke out during what has been described as competing protests between white nationalists and anti-fascist protesters, though the violence hijacked any attempt at making political statements.

These clashes are the basis for legitimate concerns leading up to Coulters event, Roland said.

That is really the linchpin for how the court will resolve the issue, he said.

He referred to another case in 1969, when students wanted to host Vietnam Moratorium Day Observance at Clemson University in South Carolina and had hoped 3,000 people would join.

The administration rejected the request, citing a prior event that led to unrest and concerns that it might become a riot but they said they would approve a smaller event focused only on the universitys students. The court ruled in favor of the university, stating that the school had the right to protect itself against the possibility of violence and disruption.

Still, it was a district court that does not have jurisdiction over California and the decision may not necessarily influence a federal judge. The Auburn University case was the only federal court of appeals case that resembles Berkeleys situation, but it is also non-binding on federal courts in California.

Amazingly enough, very few courts have dealt with this particular issue, said Roland. Since there is really only one federal court of appeals decision and particularly since that case is a half-century old, the courts dealing with this situation will have a lot of flexibility to find whatever balance they think is appropriate.

Jandhyala said he had initially worried about bringing Coulter to campus, describing her as polemic and a pundit but had hoped to provide a platform for her opponents to engage in a respectful conversation. BridgeCal committed $3,000 to the event in addition to the $17,000 provided by the foundation.

Shes someone who represents something that a lot of people in this nation believe, he said. Theres no denying the fact that if we disagree with her its something we need to confront eventually.

After Coulter said she would still speak in Berkeley on April 27, despite the school declining to host her, BridgeUSAs director for chapter development said in an email it would pull its support, denouncing her assertion as a publicity stunt.

We were actually one of the organizations to push for a reschedule in which security concerns could be met which would have taken place on May 2nd, Roge Karma wrote. However, we are disengaging from the attempt to still host Ann Coulter on the original date outside of the University.

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UC Berkeley reschedules Ann Coulter talk -- and raises thorny legal question - PBS NewsHour

Former Vermont governor Howard Dean writes:

This leads me to repeat what Ive said before: There is no hate speech exception to the First Amendment. Hateful ideas (whatever exactly that might mean) are just as protected under the First Amendment as other ideas. One is as free to condemn, for instance, Islam or Muslims, or Jews, or blacks, or whites, or illegal immigrants, or native-born citizens as one is to condemn capitalism or socialism or Democrats or Republicans. As the Supreme Court noted inChristian Legal Society v. Martinez(2010), the First Amendments tradition of protect[ing] the freedom to express the thought that we hate includes the right to express even discriminatory viewpoints. (The quote comes from the four liberal justices, plus Justice Anthony Kennedy, but the four more conservative justices would have entirely agreed with this, though also extended it to university-recognized student groups freedom to exclude members, and not just their freedom to express their thoughts.)

To be sure, there are some kinds of speech that are unprotected by the First Amendment. But those narrow exceptions have nothing to do with hate speech in any conventionally used sense of the term. For instance, there is an exception for fighting words face-to-face personal insults addressed to a specific person, of the sort that are likely to start an immediate fight. But this exception isnt limited to racial or religious insults, nor does it cover all racially or religiously offensive statements. Indeed, when the City of St. Paul tried to specifically punish bigoted fighting words, the Supreme Court held that this selective prohibition was unconstitutional (R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul (1992)), even though a broad ban on all fighting words would indeed be permissible.

The same is true of the other narrow exceptions, such as for true threats of illegal conduct or incitement intended to and likely to produce imminent illegal conduct i.e., illegal conduct in the next few hours or maybe days, as opposed to some illegal conduct some time in the future. But these are very narrow exceptions. Deans post came in response to a Steven Greenhouse tweet saying, Free Speech Defenders Dont Forget: Ann Coulter once said: My only regret w/ Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times building; but if Dean meant that such speech by Coulter is constitutionally unprotected, hes wrong. Indeed, even if Coulter was speaking seriously (which I doubt), such speech isnt unprotected incitement, because it isnt intended to promote imminent illegal conduct. Compare, e.g., Rankin v. McPherson (1987), which upheld the right to say, after President Ronald Reagan was wounded in an assassination attempt, If they go for him again, I hope they get him and that was in a case involving a government employee being fired for her speech; the First Amendment offers even stronger protection to ordinary citizens whose speech is more directly restricted by the government.

Returning to bigoted speech, which is what most people use hate speech to mean, threatening to kill someone because hes black (or white), or intentionally inciting someone to a likely and immediate attack on someone because hes Muslim (or Christian or Jewish), can be made a crime. But this isnt because its hate speech; its because its illegal to make true threats and incite imminent crimes against anyone and for any reason, for instance because they are police officers or capitalists or just someone who is sleeping with the speakers ex-girlfriend.

The Supreme Court did, in Beauharnais v. Illinois (1952), uphold a group libel law that outlawed statements that expose racial or religious groups to contempt or hatred, unless the speaker could show that the statements were true and were said with good motives and for justifiable ends. But this, too, was treated by the court as just a special case of a broader First Amendment exception the one for libel generally. And Beauharnais is widely understood to no longer be good law, given the courts restrictions on the libel exception. See New York Times Co. v. Sullivan (1964) (rejecting the view that libel is categorically unprotected, and holding that the libel exception requires a showing that the libelous accusations be of and concerning a particular person); Garrison v. Louisiana (1964) (generally rejecting the view that a defense of truth can be limited to speech that is said for good motives and for justifiable ends); Philadelphia Newspapers, Inc. v. Hepps (1986) (generally rejecting the view that the burden of proving truth can be placed on the defendant); R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul (1992) (holding that singling bigoted speech is unconstitutional, even when that speech fits within a First Amendment exception); Nuxoll ex rel. Nuxoll v. Indian Prairie Sch. Dist. # 204, 523 F.3d 668, 672 (7th Cir. 2008) (concluding that Beauharnais is no longer good law); Dworkin v. Hustler Magazine Inc., 867 F.2d 1188, 1200 (9th Cir. 1989) (likewise); Am. Booksellers Assn, Inc. v. Hudnut, 771 F.2d 323, 331 n.3 (7th Cir. 1985) (likewise); Collin v. Smith, 578 F.2d 1197, 1205 (7th Cir. 1978) (likewise); Tollett v. United States, 485 F.2d 1087, 1094 n.14 (8th Cir. 1973) (likewise); Erwin Chemerinsky, Constitutional Law: Principles and Policies 1043-45 (4th ed. 2011); Laurence Tribe, Constitutional Law, 12-17, at 926; Toni M. Massaro, Equality and Freedom of Expression: The Hate Speech Dilemma, 32 Wm. & Mary L. Rev. 211, 219 (1991); Robert C. Post, Cultural Heterogeneity and Law: Pornography, Blasphemy, and the First Amendment, 76 Calif. L. Rev. 297, 330-31 (1988).

Finally, hostile environment harassment law has sometimes been read as applying civil liability or administrative discipline by universities to allegedly bigoted speech in workplaces, universities and places of public accommodation. There is a hot debate on whether those restrictions are indeed constitutional; they have generally been held unconstitutional when applied to universities, but decisions are mixed as to civil liability based on speech that creates hostile environments in workplaces (see the pages linked to at this site for more information on the subject). But even when those restrictions have been upheld, they have been justified precisely on the rationale that they do not criminalize speech (or otherwise punish it) in society at large, but apply only to particular contexts, such as workplaces. None of them represent a hate speech exception, nor have they been defined in terms of hate speech.

For this very reason, hate speech also doesnt have any fixed legal meaning under U.S. law. U.S. law has just never had occasion to define hate speech any more than it has had occasion to define rudeness, evil ideas, unpatriotic speech or any other kind of speech that people might condemn but that does not constitute a legally relevant category.

Of course, one can certainly argue that First Amendment law should be changed to allow bans on hate speech (whether bigoted speech, blasphemy, blasphemy to which foreigners may respond with attacks on Americans, flag burning, or anything else). I think no such exception should be recognized, but of course, like all questions about what the law ought to be, this is a matter that can be debated. Indeed, people have a First Amendment right to call for speech restrictions, just as they have a First Amendment right to call for gun bans or bans on Islam or government-imposed race discrimination or anything else that current constitutional law forbids. Constitutional law is no more set in stone than any other law.

But those who want to make such arguments should acknowledge that they are calling for a change in First Amendment law and should explain just what that change would be, so people can thoughtfully evaluate it. Calls for a new First Amendment exception for hate speech shouldnt rely just on the undefined term hate speech they should explain just what viewpoints the government would be allowed to suppress, what viewpoints would remain protected and how judges, juries and prosecutors are supposed to distinguish the two. And claiming that hate speech is already not protected by the first amendment, as if one is just restating settled law, does not suffice.

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No, Gov. Dean, there is no 'hate speech' exception to the First Amendment - Washington Post