Free Speech Friday – LAWYERS & LIQUOR

Fundamental Friday: You Don’t Have A Constitutional Right To Infect.

[Note: If you’re new here, possibly from a thing I did a couple days ago, rest assured that this is one of those boring lawyer posts where I talk down to people in a condescending manner about a topic. You should recognize it. In fact, I know you do because I’ve reviewed a lot of your firm “blogs” and am well aware each and every one of you think talking to people like they’ve suffered some form of traumatic brain injury is the way you need to speak to potential clients. It’s cool. I get it. You’re an asshole. Anyhow, this one’s more for the laymen, layladies, and lay-people-of-no-or-any-gender, so sit back and enjoy a really long diatribe.]

Welcome to Lawyers & Liquor, a site that’s updated about as often as my invoices are being paid these days. I’m your host, the Boozy Barrister, and this month we’re going to open with something a little different from our typical Free Speech Friday to take a brief foray into the world of constitutional rights and legitimate exercises of the state’s police powers in a time of turmoil. You know, like a worldwide pandemic and a nation that has essentially stuck up a sign that says “Be Back Soon” on the sliding plexiglass door that is our borders. But before we get into all of that fun stuff, please allow me to take a moment and direct you to the list of the Lawyers & Liquor Patreon supporters who provide financial backing for all of the idiotic stuff we do here.

We all on the same page here? Good, now gather around because I want to be exceedingly clear in this time of turmoil:

You do not have a constitutional right to be a complete jackass and infect those around you, and the government absolutely has the precedential ability to restrict you from doing so. And today, Typhoid Dipshit, I’m going to go into why.

Quack Quack Honk Presents Free Speech Friday: Defamation and Paul the Pud Pulling Youtuber

Welcome back to Free Speech Friday here on Lawyers & Liquor, where we discuss the concepts, cases, and limitations behind the system of speech in this wonderful country – namely the United States of America – and learn some neat shit about free speech jurisprudence and concepts together. I’m your constitutionally inept attorney host, the Boozy Barrister, here at the behest of the Free Speech Friday sponsor, Quack Quack Honk Designs!

In case you don’t know who that is, Quack Quack Honk Designs is an awesome independent art studio and artist set up in the wilds of Michigan that provides a large number of original works in adorable and neat styles. I have several of their prints decorating my office for when I go home and wash off the blood of my litigation enemies before settling into my den with a nice plate of cookies to and listening to old sing along story tapes, and you can too if you visit their storefront or drop into one of the many upcoming art show appearances to peruse their works! If you do, though, be sure to tell them that a drunken, angry, profane lawyer sent you their way.

In past editions of Free Speech Friday we’ve discussed the founding of the First Amendment and how it seemed to be the clearest thing in the world until, you know, it fucking wasn’t. We’ve also talked about how John Adams and his administration went out of their way to shit all over the constitutional protection to say what you want free from government interference. But today we’re gonna veer away from the historical to talk about something we need to recognize before we go too far down the rabbithole of what you can say without getting smacked upside your loose-lipped head by the giant dick of justice. That’s right, today we’re going to talk about situations where the right to speak freely is sharply curtailed, not by a desire to silence the speaker but because of the malicious and detrimental effect some types of speech can have on the subjects – especially when the speech is enough to set someone’s pants on fire. Today, we’re going to delve into the defamatory world of slander and libel. But first, a disclaimer.

Quack Quack Honk Designs Presents Free Speech Friday: John Adams Hated Bad Press.

Welcome to the second in an installment series here on Lawyers & Liquor where I, the bloviating blowhard that is the Boozy Barrister, become your cut rate Ms. Frizzle as we go on a magical journey of learning together about the First Amendment and, more specifically, the freedom of speech that it guarantees. This month we have a new sponsor hanging around here, the lovable and talented Quack Quack Honk Designs! A lovely artist from the cold regions of the world…like…those places north of Ohio, QQH is a wonderful artist who appears at art fairs all over the place selling their work, and right now if you jump into the fray at their website you can even use them to design your holiday cards! HOP TO IT, because Art is a form of speech, and my speech says you should buy shit from them!

As I told you last time, myself and Constitutional Law had a love/hate relationship in law school, in no small part because it was a two hour class very fucking early in the morning and I wasn’t ready for any of that deep thought at that point. As a result, while I certainly understand and know con law, I never really got into the in-depth study of it. There’s just not a lot of call for constitutional arguments in the course of keeping a person’s home or defending a DUI, and to the extent there are you pick up that part of it on basic principles and practice, not by the in-depth study of the issuance of letters of marque and shit like that.

Now, as I may have said in the past, the principles of the freedom of speech were basically considered so non-controversial that, in debating the meaning of them, Congress essentially went “that’s really verbose for something we all know what it means, so we’re just gonna pare that shit right there down a bit.” Fuck, as I pointed out last time there was pretty much no discussion about this shit on the floor of the Congress at all at the time it was passed other than someone taking out the red marker and pulling the old Hemingway “say more with less” approach to cutting out what they determined were superfluous words. However, as we now know, the founding fuckers were being a little optimistic in their estimation of mankind’s intelligence in taking this tack, as what happened thereafter was a hodgepodge of judicial determinations as to what the limits and benefits of free speech actually were under the Bill of Rights, leading to the modern interpretation of the short amendment (shorter, in fact, than this post to this point) and its guarantee of basic liberty for the people that live under its rule. And, with the Bill of Rights ratified in 1791, it wasn’t even a full decade before the first major challenge to free speech came to national prominence.

You know, because President John Adams really fucking hated criticism. Enough that he made it a jailable offense.

Free Speech Friday: The First Amendment – One Sentence, 10,000 annotations

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

U.S. Const. Amend. I

Welcome to the first of a new monthly series here on Lawyers & Liquor, which we’re calling “Free Speech Friday.” I’m your host, the Boozy Barrister. Over the next however long it takes us, we’re gonna take one Friday a month to discuss legal issues of free speech and constitutional law here, both areas that I, as a shitty shit lawyer in Shitadelphia, Shitsylvania am not overly familiar with. So, this will be a learning experience for both of us, as Boozy pursues edification and then, like the loving momma bird that I am, promptly turns to vomit up the knowledge into your eagerly cheeping mouths.

Yes, I know, that’s probably someone’s fetish. Put it back in your pants, Pete. We got law to talk about.

More specifically, we have one specific law to talk about, being the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. You can see the whole fucking text of the thing above, one sentence that lasts 45 words and has caused more goddamn trouble to the courts than anything else. One sentence that has been used to guarantee the rights of everyone from activists marching for racial equality to assholes picketing funerals. 45 words that have been interpreted to allow folks to spout 14 words in city center when they seek to do so. Often contentious, and always loud, the First Amendment is, as author and Huffington Post journalist Naomi Wolf said, “designed to allow for disruption of business as usual. It is not a quiet and subdued amendment or right.”

In other words, it is the right to be fucking loud and, in general, do so without fear of restriction from the government. But how, exactly, did we come about gaining that right, written into the very foundational documents of our nation’s history? And why?

That’s what we’re talking about today on Free Speech Friday: the birth of the First Amendment and the why of why we have it. So sit back, grab some popcorn, and let’s get going with an impromptu legal history lesson.

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