Academic

More Nominations for the Ceausescu Prize

By Calvin Massey

  Today's nominees for the coveted Ceausescu Prize for amazing ignorance of or contempt for civil liberty are two cops from Searcy, Arkansas, who arrested a candidate for public office for displaying a sign that charged his opponents (one of whom is a city alderman) for being "chicken shit" by reason of their refusal to debate him.  To be sure, the cops claim that the arrest was for disorderly conduct, consisting of refusal to follow instructions of the officer, but those instructions were to remove the word "shit" from the sign.  These fellows have apparently never heard of Cohen v. California, which is a canonical holding of the USSC that governments lack power to excise vulgarities from the public vocabulary, at least when they are uttered or displayed in a public context in which there are no privacy interests that are being invaded in an intolerable fashion.  The news account is here; Eugene Volokh's excellent take on the issue is here. 

Full post as published by The Faculty Lounge on October 20, 2008 (boomark / email).