A constitutional scholar argues that the film that seems to have sparked the unrest in the Middle East is constitutinally protected under the First Amendment's Free Speech Clause.
Here's an exerpt from an interview with him, his comments go hand in hand with general points we will be making about the court rules in cases involving uses of First Amendment freedoms that are judged offensive by some and lead to violent retaliation:
As people try to puzzle out whether there is any legal action possible against either the filmmaker or Terry Jones, two ideas keep coming up. One is that the film and the promotion of the film are protected speech, and one is that this has somehow crossed a line, and that either the film itself or Jones's promotion of it constitute something akin to that famous example of "yelling fire in a crowded theater." What's the line between protected speech, even hate speech, and speech that's not protected?
The relevant question is whether or not speech is an incitement to riot, or to produce any other imminent lawless action. Whether it incites violence is the central question -- and that means not just that the speech produces violence, but that the speaker intends it to.
Generally speaking, the rule is you can't be held liable for speech that moves other people to violence unless your speech is intended to producing violence and is likely to almost immediately produce it. That's the point of the familiar example of shouting "fire" in a crowded theater -- you're trying to cause a ruckus. But you can also see why this is not the best example. Sometimes there actually is a fire.
So intent is critical.
Yes. Imagine if somebody digs up a film, made in 1950, that portrays Arabs or Islam in a bad light. I'm sure there are a lot of them. Someone releases it online, and people see it and say it's insulting to Islam and then they riot. Even if someone released the film knowing that it would be likely to produce a riot, that doesn't mean the film was made with the intent of producing a riot.
Given that, it seems like the filmmaker is pretty clearly within his rights in making and releasing the film. But what about Terry Jones? He screened and publicized the trailer as part of a so-called "International Judge Muhammad Day."
The question is still whether Terry Jones is deliberately trying to incite a riot by promoting the speech at issue - and were his actions almost certain to have produced any resulting riot? The case is further complicated by the fact that the riots occur outside the United States. But let's assume that where the riots occur makes no difference. The question would be, are his actions directed to causing the riots?
