The Courts and the Constitution: Hate Speech and Pornography in the United States, Canada, and Europe

In the landmark 1969 case of Brandenburg v. Ohio , 1 the United States Supreme Court upheld the right of the Ku Klux Klan to advocate at rallies for the return of all Jews to Israel and all African-Americans to Africa, a result appearing to privilege the liberty of the speakers at the expense of the equality of their targets. The Court held that since the advocacy was not intended to incite direct action towards those ends — and thus did not trigger a ‘fighting words’ exemption from First Amendment protection — it must be protected as political speech, the most protected class of speech in the US First Amendment framework. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.