When you hear someone talk about a "fire in a crowded theater" or a "hate speech" "exception" to free speech (free from punishment and from prior restraint), they are talking out of their arse-hole.
Don't be that guy.
Be smart, be free; don't be the dummy blabbering about fire in a theater. If you hear someone doing so, here's a law-skool class, gratis, that you can use to set them straight.
Who better to teach you what NOT to do or say than Nancy?
Yelling ‘Wolf’ in a Crowded Theater? Nancy Pelosi Flunks Constitutional Law
* It's Time to Stop Using the 'Fire in a Crowded Theater' QuoteYesterday Nancy Pelosi granted an interview to a San Francisco television station, and the first ninety seconds are something to behold. She repeated her request that the National Park Service deny a permit to an alleged “alt-right demonstration” called Patriot Prayer. Pelosi said “not allow these elements to use a national park to spew forth their venom.” She then said that “protecting people” was the Park Service’s “first responsibility.” When the interviewer, Pam Moore, pressed Pelosi to consider Patriot Prayer’s First Amendment rights, Pelosi responded, “The Constitution does not say that a person can yell wolf in a crowded theater. If you are endangering people, then you don’t have a constitutional right to do that.”
. . .
[T]he quote is wrong. She’s obviously referring to Oliver Wendell Holmes’s famous statement in Schenck v. United States that “The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic.” Fire. Wolf. Whatever. It’s not important compared to the next point below.
[A]nyone who quotes Schenck is quoting bad law. In fact, it’s one of the most “odious free speech decisions in the Court’s history.”* The court upheld the Espionage Act conviction of the secretary of the Socialist Party of America for writing and distributing a pamphlet opposing the draft during World War I. Schenck could never be sent to jail for this conduct today.
The proper standard is outlined in Brandenburg v. Ohio, and that case is completely silent regarding the wolf threat. Under Brandenburg, speakers can advocate violence even in front of an armed crowd unless their speech is “directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action” (emphasis added).
Ninety-three years ago, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote what is perhaps the most well-known -- yet misquoted and misused -- phrase in Supreme Court history: "The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic."
Without fail, whenever a free speech controversy hits, someone will cite this phrase as proof of limits on the First Amendment. And whatever that controversy may be, "the law"--as some have curiously called it--can be interpreted to suggest that we should err on the side of censorship. Holmes' quote has become a crutch for every censor in America, yet the quote is wildly misunderstood.
