Now this is interesting. I just watched this debate on “Freedoms of Speech” between Christopher Hitchens and Shashi Tharoor. I studied Constitutional law in college, and even I didn’t know the history behind this famous legal declaration:
Shashi Tharoor: I think it’s also worthwhile quoting the American Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who said that freedom of speech does not extend to the right to shout fire, falsely, in a crowded theater.
Christopher Hitchens: Justice Holmes’s famous judgment, it seems to me, is one of the stupidest remarks ever made from the bench of the United States Supreme Court and, by the way, he made it in the following context: A group of Yiddish-speaking socialists, who were opposed to Mr. Wilson’s first World War … America’s participation in the imperial bloodbath, gave out leaflets — in Yiddish — in New York saying don’t sign up for the war, don’t believe in it, you’re being led into a disaster. They were put in prison for life, for producing leaflets in Yiddish making a socialist case against the war, and bloody fool Oliver Wendell Holmes had the nerve to say it was the equivalent of shouting fire in a crowded theater where there was no fire. Course there was a fire! There was a bloodbath on the Western Front. That’s a fire enough for anybody.
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