Brandenburg v. Ohio, , was a United States Supreme Court case based on the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. It held that government cannot punish inflammatory speech unless it is directed to inciting and likely to incite imminent lawless action.

Background of the case

Clarence Brandenburg, a Ku Klux Klan (KKK) leader in rural Ohio, contacted a reporter at a Cincinnati television station and invited him to come and cover a KKK rally in Hamilton County. Portions of the rally were taped, showing several men in robes and hoods, some carrying firearms, first burning a cross and then making speeches. One of the speeches made reference to the possibility of "revengeance" [sic] against "niggers," "Jews" and those who supported them. One of the speeches also claimed that "our President, our Congress, our Supreme Court, continues to suppress the white, Caucasian race," and announced plans for a march on Washington to take place July 4. Brandenburg was later convicted of advocating violence under Ohio's Criminal Syndicalism statute for his participation in the rally and for the speech he made. In relevant part, the statute proscribed "advocat[ing] .. . the duty, necessity, or propriety of crime, sabotage, violence, or unlawful methods of terrorism as a means of accomplishing industrial or political reform" and "voluntarily assembl[ing] with any society, group or assemblage of persons formed to teach or advocate the doctrines of criminal syndicalism." He was fined $1,000 and sentenced to one to ten years in prison.

Brandenburg's conviction was affirmed by an Ohio appellate court despite his claim that the statute violated his First Amendment and Fourteenth Amendment right to freedom of speech. The Ohio Supreme Court dismissed his appeal without opinion. The rather cursory way in which the Ohio courts dismissed Brandenburg's constitutional arguments is unsurprising in light of the state of First Amendment law in the pre-Brandenburg era. Although Yates v. United States, 354 U.S. 298 (1957), had overturned the convictions of mid-level Communist Party members in language that seemed suggestive of a broader view of freedom of expression rights than had been accorded them in Dennis v. United States, 341 U.S. 494 (1951), all Yates purported to do was construe a federal statute, the Smith Act. Thus, Dennis reading of the First Amendment remained in force: advocacy of law violation, even as an abstract doctrine, could be punished under law consistent with the free speech clause.

The Court's decision

The U.S. Supreme Court reversed Brandenburg's conviction, holding that government cannot constitutionally punish abstract advocacy of force or law violation. The unanimous majority opinion was per curiam (issued from the Court as an institution rather than as authored and signed by an individual justice). The earlier draft had originally been prepared by Justice Abe Fortas before he was forced to resign in the midst of an ethics scandal, and would have included a modified version of the clear and present danger test. In finalizing the draft, Justice Brennan eliminated all references to it, substituting instead the "imminent lawless action" language.^[1] Justices Black and Douglas concurred separately.

Per curiam opinion

The per curiam majority opinion overturned the Ohio Criminal Syndicalism statute, overruled Whitney v. California, 274 U.S. 357 (1927), and articulated a new test ? the "imminent lawless action" test ? for judging so-called seditious speech under the First Amendment:

The three distinct elements of this test (intent, imminence, and likelihood) have distinct precedential lineages. Judge Learned Hand was possibly the first judge to advocate the intent standard, in Masses Publishing Co. v. Patten, 244 F. 535 (S.D.N.Y. 1917), reasoning that "[i]f one stops short of urging upon others that it is their duty or their interest to resist the law, it seems to me one should not be held to have attempted to cause its violation." The Brandenburg intent standard is more speech-protective than Hand's formulation, which contained no temporal element.

The imminence element was a departure from earlier rulings. In Schenck v. United States, 249 U.S. 47 (1919), the Court had adopted a "clear and present danger" test that Whitney v. California had expanded to a bad tendency test: if speech has a "tendency" to cause sedition or lawlessness, it may constitutionally be prohibited. Dennis v. United States, a case dealing with prosecution of alleged Communists under the Smith Act for advocating the overthrow of the government, used the clear and present danger test while still upholding the defendants' convictions for acts that could not possibly have led to a speedy overthrow of the government. Brandenburg did not explicitly overrule the bad tendency test, but it appears that after "Brandenburg" the test is de facto overruled. "Brandenburg" also made the time element of the clear and present danger test more defined and more rigorous.

Interestingly, the per curiam opinion cited to Dennis v. United States as though it were good law and amenable to the result reached in Brandenburg. In point of fact, Brandenburg essentially eviscerated Denniss central holding and held that "mere advocacy" of any doctrine, including one that assumed the necessity of violence or law violation, was per se protected speech. It may be that principles of stare decisis figured in the Court's decision to avoid overruling the relatively recent Dennis, but the distance between the two cases' approach is obvious and irreconcilable.

Concurrences

Justice Hugo Black, renowned civil libertarian and First Amendment absolutist, filed a short concurrence indicating his agreement with Justice William O. Douglas's longer opinion and pointing out that the per curiams reliance on Dennis was more symbolic than actual. Justice Douglas's concurrence reflected the absolutist position that only he and Black ever fully subscribed to, namely that the phrase "no law" in the First Amendment ought to be interpreted very literally, and that all speech is immune from prosecution, regardless of the governmental interests advanced in suppressing some particular instance of speech. He briefly traced the history of the clear and present danger test, illustrating how it had been used over the years since its debut in Schenck to dismiss dozens of what Douglas viewed as legitimate First Amendment claims. A short but interesting section of Douglas's opinion indicated that he might be open to allowing the government greater latitude in controlling speech during time of "declared war" (making clear that he was not referring to the then-current Vietnam conflict), although he only phrased that possibility in terms of doubt (as opposed to his certainty that the clear and present danger test was irreconcilable with the First Amendment during time of peace). Douglas also pointed out the legitimate role of symbolic speech in First Amendment doctrine, using examples of a person ripping up a Bible to celebrate the abandonment of his faith or tearing a copy of the Constitution in order to protest a Supreme Court decision, and assailed the previous term's United States v. O'Brien, 391 U.S. 367 (1968), which had allowed for the prosecution of a man for burning his draft card. In all these situations, Douglas argued, an action was a vital way of conveying a certain message, and thus the action itself deserved First Amendment protection. Finally, Douglas dealt with the classic example of a man "falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic." In order to explain why someone could be legitimately prosecuted for this, Douglas called it an example in which "speech is brigaded with action." In the view of Douglas and Black, this was probably the only sort of case in which a person could be prosecuted for speech.

Subsequent developments

The Brandenburg test was the Court's last major statement on what government may do about inflammatory speech that seeks to incite others to lawless action. It resolved the debate between those who urged greater government control of speech for reasons of security and those who favored allowing as much speech as possible and relying on the marketplace of ideas to reach a favorable result, leaving the law in a state along the lines of that which Justices Louis Brandeis, and, post-Schenck, Oliver Wendell Holmes advocated in several dissents and concurrences during the late 1910s and early 1920s. As of 2008, the Brandenburg test is still the standard used for evaluating attempts to punish inflammatory speech, and it has not been seriously challenged since it was laid down in 1969. Very few cases have actually reached the Court during the past decades that would test the outer limits of Brandenburg, so the test remains largely unqualified.

See also

• List of United States Supreme Court cases, volume 395
• Schenck v. United States,
• Abrams v. United States,
• Whitney v. California,
• Dennis v. United States,
• Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire
• Terminiello v. Chicago

References

Further reading

External links

• First Amendment Library entry on ''Brandenburg v. Ohio''