Freedom of speech in the United States is protected by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution and by many state constitutions and state and federal laws. The freedom is not absolute; the Supreme Court of the United States has recognized several categories of speech that are excluded from the freedom of speech, and it has recognized that governments may enact reasonable time, place, or manner restrictions on speech.
Criticism of the government and advocacy of unpopular ideas that people may find distasteful or against public policy are almost always permitted. There are exceptions to these general protections, including the Miller test for obscenity, child pornography laws, speech that incites imminent lawless action, and regulation of commercial speech such as advertising. Within these limited areas, other limitations on free speech balance rights to free speech and other rights, such as rights for authors and inventors over their works and discoveries (copyright and patent), protection from imminent or potential violence against particular persons (restrictions on fighting words), or the use of untruths to harm others (slander). Distinctions are often made between speech and other acts which may have symbolic significance.
Despite the exceptions, the legal protections of the First Amendment are some of the broadest of any industrialized nation, and remain a critical, and occasionally controversial, component of American jurisprudence.
Read more about Freedom Of Speech In The United States: First Amendment, Types of Speech Restrictions, Private Actors, Censorship, Internet Speech
Famous quotes containing the words united states, freedom of, freedom, speech, united and/or states:
“The United States must be neutral in fact as well as in name.... We must be impartial in thought as well as in action ... a nation that neither sits in judgment upon others nor is disturbed in her own counsels and which keeps herself fit and free to do what is honest and disinterested and truly serviceable for the peace of the world.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)
“Woe to that nation whose literature is cut short by the intrusion of force. This is not merely interference with freedom of the press but the sealing up of a nation’s heart, the excision of its memory.”
—Alexander Solzhenitsyn (b. 1918)
“the child unlucky in his little State,
Some hearth where freedom is excluded,
A hive whose honey is fear and worry,
Feels calmer now and somehow assured of escape;”
—W.H. (Wystan Hugh)
“I, schooled in misery, know many purifying rites, and I know where speech is proper and where silence.”
—Aeschylus (525–456 B.C.)
“... it is probable that in a fit of generosity the men of the United States would have enfranchised its women en masse; and the government now staggering under the ballots of ignorant, irresponsible men, must have gone down under the additional burden of the votes which would have been thrown upon it, by millions of ignorant, irresponsible women.”
—Jane Grey Swisshelm (1815–1884)
“The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western World. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity—much less dissent.”
—Gore Vidal (b. 1925)