How Would Justice Douglas View Free-Speech Statements?

In her class last semester, Princeton professor Carolyn Rouse had a free-speech statement in her syllabus titled, “Speak Freely with Many Caveats.”

It listed a set of values students must abide by and certain topics they could not debate. 

“Nothing is sustainable if we destroy our environment in the process of ‘developing’ it,” she wrote. 

They could not “debate whether slavery, Nazism, Japanese internment, Stalinism, Jim Crow, Apartheid, or dumping toxic waste into our rivers and streams are good things.”

“I thought, let me make the implicit rules [of speech] explicit in order to find a way to debate new topics, that traditionally have not been in the academy, without opening ourselves up to justifying violent racist policies,” Rouse told PAW.

My Comment:  To say progressive Justice William O. Douglas would not agree would be an understatement:

Douglas repeatedly contended that thought and speech may not be limited in the absence of injurious actions.

Douglas wrote the majority opinion in a case overturning the disorderly conduct conviction of an antisemitic priest whose inflammatory speech nearly led to a riot. Similarly, he rejected the idea that obscenity should be unprotected speech.  

In a dissent, he argued that mere membership in a group such as the Communist Party does not pose a clear and present danger that warrants banning speech and limiting association.

In another case, he insisted that the government must have a compelling and immediate interest to impose any limit on speech or the press.

He wrote: “Free speech has occupied an exalted position because of the high service it has given our society. Its protection is essential to the very existence of a democracy … . It has been the safeguard of every religious, political, philosophical, economic, and racial group amongst us … . [Free speech] has been the one single outstanding tenet that has made our institutions the symbol of freedom and equality.”

The First Amendment was designed “to invite dispute,” to induce “a condition of unrest,” to “create dissatisfaction with conditions as they are,” and even to stir “people to anger,” Douglas wrote.

The idea that the First Amendment permits punishment for ideas that are “offensive” to the particular judge or jury sitting in judgment is astounding. No greater leveler of speech or literature has ever been designed. To give the power to the censor, as we do today, is to make a sharp and radical break with the traditions of a free society. The First Amendment was not fashioned as a vehicle for dispensing tranquilizers to the people. Its prime function was to keep debate open to “offensive” as well as to “staid” people.