The First Amendment guarantees every person the right of free speech, but that right is not absolute. Some words “by their very utterance” cause injury or incite an immediate breach of peace, and they do not receive constitutional protection.[2] Among the category of unprotected speech are “true threats,” statements in which a speaker expresses a “serious” intent “to commit an act of unlawful violence to a particular individual or group of individuals.”[3] Even though statutes that punish unprotected speech have “never been thought to raise any Constitutional problem”[4] and Congress has made it a crime to use interstate communications facilities to make “threats,” the law governing this subject has been unclear.[5]
Hope you learned something today.