The First Amendment and “Murderous Exhortations”

Marc Rohr, Shepard Broad Law Center (Nova Law School) has published ‘Threatening’ Speech: The Challenge of Murderous Exhortations as NSU Shepard Broad Law Center Research Paper No. 14-002. Here is the abstract.

Advocacy of murder of identifiable individuals, which might be protected under the Brandenburg test, has too often been treated by courts (particularly in some recent federal appellate cases) as unprotected threats or solicitation, thus making First Amendment analysis confused and unpredictable. The appropriate solution, I argue, is to modify the Brandenburg test so as to deny First Amendment protection to advocacy of harm to identified targets, because (a) such speech has no value worthy of First Amendment protection and (b) the emotional consequences of such advocacy suffered by the object thereof is no different from that caused by true threats.

Download the paper from SSRN at the link.