Alan Dershowitz Lays Out What It Would Take For Supreme Court To Chisel Away At Famous Free Speech Ruling

by Daily Caller News Foundation reporter Harold Hutchinson.

Noted attorney Alan Dershowitz said on Wednesday that recent attacks on Jews could lead the Supreme Court to weaken a legal standard protecting free speech.

Mohamed Sabry Soliman allegedly used Molotov cocktails and a jury-rigged flamethrower when he attacked a June 1 event in Boulder, Colorado, supporting hostages taken during the Oct. 7, 2023, attack by the radical Islamic terrorist group Hamas that killed over 1,200 people in Israel. Dershowitz said that calls to “globalize” intifada could result in the high court revisiting the 1969 case of Brandenburg v. Ohio if the right circumstances arose.

“Here’s my predictive view based on my expertise as a constitutional lawyer and as an appellate lawyer,” Dershowitz said on “The Dershow.” “I think if the right case came before the Supreme Court, they would cut back a little bit on Brandenburg and would reduce the imminency requirement, to something a little bit different. There had been a prior formulation by Judge Learned Hand which gave more permissiveness to the state to ban a dangerous freedom of speech how dangerous the speech was discounted by the likelihood of it not occurring, a kind of balancing, balancing test, but it didn’t include the concept of imminence.”

Dershowitz recounted a case in England where a person who shouted “give it to him” was convicted of inciting a mentally ill person to shoot a police officer, since the court interpreted the statement as urging the person to fire the gun. Dershowitz said experience with attacks with a pro-Hamas motivation could lead the high court to adjust the requirement.

“Incitement doesn’t have to actually lead to lawlessness, it’s enough if the incitement is likely to lead to imminent lawlessness, but the lawlessness has to be imminent and it is the imminence requirements that I suspect the courts will change and why? Because the law changes with experience, as Oliver Wendell Holmes, once said, life and law is not logic, it’s experience and our experience now is that calls for violence against Jews in the context of what’s going on now has produced violence,” Dershowitz said. “I have no doubt that the killing of the two young people in Washington ,D.C., was influenced by calls for global intifada. I have no doubt that the burning of, I don’t know, ten or 11 Jews, including a Holocaust survivor, in Boulder, Colorado, was influenced by the calls for a global intifada.” (RELATED: Attacks Against Free Speech Ramp Up In Tech Community, Silencing Millions Of Voices)

Pro-Hamas demonstrations since the attack by Hamas have seen anti-Israel protesters occupy buildings, chant a slogan that has connotations of wiping out Israel and block Jewish students from parts of campus.

“There’s going to be a change, that’s my prediction, and it may be I’m not going to be around to be here when that prediction takes hold, but I guarantee you that in the next quarter of a century, whatever the Supreme Court is, it will not allow incitement to violence which is very likely to produce violence, even certain to produce violence, as long as that violence is not imminent, I think the imminency requirement will be weakened by the United States Supreme Court,” Dershowitz concluded.

MV Review

While we’re no strangers to the controversies surrounding Dershowitz, his skills as an attorney are hard to beat. It is pretty terrifying think that SCOTUS could, in theory, use the heightened state of tension and stress in the U.S. to undermine our core foundation of free speech.

As everyone with common sense knows: words are not violence. Violence is violence, and there is a significant difference between the two.

In the U.K., tyrannical laws are shifting social culture to the point that people are scared to make jokes in private group chats because people have been arrested, charged, and criminalized for such actions. A former police office was convicted in 2023 of sending a private message in a private WhatsApp group chat to his friends that the British courts didn’t like. (READ MORE: Think Things Can’t Get Worse In America? A British Guy Just Got Convicted For Making A Joke In A Private Groupchat)

Without free speech, there is no America, there is no freedom … anywhere on Earth. The U.S. is truly the last bastion of common sense communication. We cannot let it go.

Never Let Censorship Win

No matter how you feel about free speech, you have a right to use it and your lawmakers depend on YOU — the voters — outside of election season, to exercise your right and guide their agenda. Changing your world starts with your locally elected officials, and goes all the way up to the White House. Did you know that it is your responsibility to tell your lawmakers what you want to happen during their time in office?

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