Free Speech and the Fight Against Terrorism

Owen Fiss, Yale University Law School, has published The World We Live In, at 83 Temple Law Review 295-308 (Winter 2011).

This Essay focuses on a threat to our constitutional order — the curtailment of freedom of speech in the name of fighting terrorism. Specifically, my subject is the Supreme Court’s decision last June in Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, which upheld the authority of Congress to criminalize political advocacy on behalf of foreign terrorist organizations. Like warrantless wiretapping, the risk of a criminal prosecution for political advocacy — for example, an utterance by an American citizen in an American forum that a foreign terrorist organization has a just cause — poses a threat to our democracy, but the danger is greater. The risk of warrantless wiretapping inhibits speech; the risk of a criminal prosecution stops it altogether.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.