Freedom of speech is indispensable to every other freedom. In fact, it's the very essence of democracy.

It promotes rational deliberation, holds public officials accountable, and fosters a marketplace of

ideas where diverse viewpoints can be debated and tested the very engine of progress.

If citizens cannot freely speak their minds, they aren't free.

As the great 19th century abolitionist, Frederick Douglass noted,

no right was deemed by the founding fathers more sacred than the right of speech.

It was in their eyes the great moral renovator of society and government. The relevant

clause of the First Amendment of the Constitution reads, Congress shall make no law bridging the

freedom of speech. But just how free should this speech be? We all recognize that there must be

limits. In the 1990 case, Shank v. United States, Justice Oliver

Wendell Holmes famously declared that you can't falsely shout fire in a crowded theater. That could

induce panic resulting in injury or death. What about speech that incites people to commit

violence? Does that cross the line? And what about what we now call hate speech?

Is that protected? These aren't easy questions. The Supreme Court has wrestled with them for decades.

The 1969 case of Brandenburg v. Ohio is a prime example. Few decisions have done more to define the

boundaries between speech that is protected by the First

Amendment and speech that is not protected than this one.

Clarence Brandenberg was the leader of an Ohio chapter of the Ku Klux Klan, a white supremacist

group violently opposed to civil rights.

The clan has had a long and ugly past stretching

back to the end of the Civil War. Their white hoods and burning crosses epitomized racism and

terror. In the summer of 1964, Brandenburg invited a Cincinnati reporter to film a Klan

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