This has nothing to do with supporting their views or their means of expressing them. That’s where this case got all screwed up, where principle died. Ten of the original 11 Muslim students who were arrested and prosecuted for staging a protest against Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren at the University of California at Irvine were convicted of crimes.
I may not agree with what you say but I will fight to the death for your right to say it.
Yes, platitudes look great when carved in marble lintels. Dean Erwin Chemerinsky (of the liberal Chemerinsky’s) tried to fence sit the mess, arguing that these students had no first amendment right to speak out because they were in an academic environment which somehow mandated that free speech was at the largesse of Miss Manners. But he didn’t think prosecution was justified. Orange County District Attorney Tony Rackauckas didn’t give a hoot what Erwin thought.
The sentence isn’t jail, which some will argue means that this is no big deal.
Ten Muslim students convicted of disrupting a speech by the Israeli ambassador on a California university campus have been sentenced to 56 hours of community service and three years of informal probation.
Orange County Superior Court Judge Peter J. Wilson said Friday that the incident did not merit jail time and he added that the probation period would be reduced to one year if the community service is completed by the end of January 2012.
Wrong. These are students whose futures will be forever altered and diminished by this conviction. Any conviction, even a misdemeanor, has a serious impact on a life. It matters.
What matters most, for these ten students not to mention the rest of us, is that their crime is speaking when those with more power than them believed it inopportune. Marc Randazza draws an interesting analogy:
11 muslim students stood up to heckle the Israeli ambassador. Orange county prosecutor charged them with disrupting an event. While they may not have a right to disrupt the speech without being dragged out of the place, a criminal conviction for political speech is bullshit.
And if it had been 11 Yeshiva students disrupting a speech by a Palestinian, they’d get the medal of freedom.
His point is not that Muslim students are more (or less) worthy than Yeshiva students, but that we can’t help from superimposing value judgments on the merit of speech, The speech we embrace doesn’t need protecting.
The choice here was between a free society and an ordered society, and the questions of right and wrong are answered by which society one prefers. It doesn’t require a person to believe the disrupting speeches is a good thing, a great way to get one’s point across, to believe that the prosecution of the Irvine 11 10 was fundamentally wrong. I think they handled their protest poorly, that just as they would have wanted a speaker they invited to be able to make his point without protest and disruption, they should have done the same for Michael Oren. They were rude and intolerant. They were inappropriate. There, I said it, they were wrong to do what they did.
And that should not have resulted in their prosecution and conviction for a crime.
It’s all too easy to fall into the rut of rights being situational. Sometimes one right conflicts with another right. Sometimes one person’s exercise of a right conflicts with another person’s exercise of the same right. Sometimes, it just doesn’t mesh with our sensibilities. Rights are messy, and get messier when they don’t happen to fall along the lines of general consensus.
But when the exercise of rights becomes the basis for a crime, it’s no longer just messy, just the stuff of debate and disagreement.
I may not agree with what you say but I will fight to the death for your right to say it.*
*Unless you don’t do it the way I think you should, in which case I will not only not fight for your right, but will convict you of a crime for having exercised it .
There’s no lintel big enough to carve that into.
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“While they may not have a right to disrupt the speech without being dragged out of the place, a criminal conviction for political speech is bullshit. “
I submit the rule here should be like that of trespass (at least as defined in Michigan): once the property owner decides you’ve worn out your welcome and asks you to leave, there is no crime unless and until you haven’t left after reasonable opportunity. If instead you insist on arrogating the stage to yourself, yes, there is a crime. But I don’t understand how a lawyer can suggest that someone who can be “dragged out” hasn’t committed a crime; if he can be seized and dragged, the difference is not whether there was a crime, but what is the process and the punishment.
Of course, if the actual motive is suppression of speech based on content, that is another matter entirely.
As for SHG’s comments, hear, hear!
“Don’t tase me, bro.”
I think shouting down a speaker is vile. It’s an anti-free-speech act of thuggery. I think that the extent to which it is protected by the First Amendment is limited at best. I don’t see these as free speech heroes at all.
However, I think the arguments about selective prosecution are well-taken. I wonder whether the defense attorneys pursued them. And even if there were no such argument, I think the prosecution was disproportionate and a questionable use of prosecutorial discretion.
(Note that one twerp has already suggested that merely saying that establishes that I must be biased against the speaker.)
That’s pretty much Danielle Citron’s argument in favor of cyber civil rights, where thuggery speech impairs angel free speech (which, per Citron, is usually women, making it a gender civil rights issue), thus requiring the criminalization of thuggery free speech in order to assure that angel free speech (women) can say what they want without fear of thuggery free speech that impairs their sense of freedom to engage in angel free speech (by women) by the threat of thuggery.
What good is a right without a remedy, and what better remedy than convicting the thugs of a crime. Right?
I don’t think they are similar at all. Shouting down actually, physically impairs me from speaking and my audience from hearing. Simply offering rude or “hurtful” comments and rebuttals does not.
If Citron were talking about a DDOS on women’s blog pages, or shouting them down when they tried to speak in public, she might have a point. She doesn’t. She’s talking about hurt feelings and entrenched intolerance of dissent, which are not the same as being shouted down.
Drowning someone out so they actually, physically can’t be heard (as opposed to offering better, more convincing, and more numerous responses) actually impairs expression. Somehow I doubt that the defendants here would still be taking the same stance about shouting down if their UCI opponents were coming to all of their meetings and rallies and shouting down their speakers.
Of course, here the shouting down/drowning out was quite brief. That’s an excellent reason for a rational and non-discriminatory prosecutor to exercise better discretion, and for a rational jury to determine that any disruption was de minimis.
But I stand by what I said. Shouting down is anti-free-speech thuggery.
This wasn’t a question of suppressing speech. The Irvine 11 could have waited to ask questions at the Q&A session, and they would not have been stopped, arrested, dragged out, etc. This isn’t a criminal conviction for political speech, it’s a conviction for preventing someone else from speaking.
Time, place, and manner can be restricted. As a free speech advocate, I find a lot of the application of time, place, and manner to be bullshit, but one good time to restrict time, place, and manner is while an invited speaker is speaking!
11 Yeshiva students shouting down a Palestinian speaker would have been arrested too. As they should be.
Reverend Al Sharpton came to speak at my college during his 2004 Presidential run. Hillel stood outside with signs protesting him being on campus. They didn’t shout him down inside the auditorium and try to prevent him from speaking. I went inside and listened to his talk, and during the Q&A session, I asked him a pointed question about his role in the Crown Heights and Freddy’s Fashion Mart incidents. He shrugged off the question quite neatly, clearly from experience, but that’s how it goes-I didn’t like the speaker, I made that clear in the Q&A, but I didn’t do anything to stop him from speaking. And had I done so, you can bet your butt I would have been escorted out at minimum, if not arrested.
Just to be clear, I wouldn’t characterize this as shouting down. Each of the students stood up during Oren’s speech, yelled out a prepared phrase and walked out. It was certainly disruptive, but didn’t preclude Oren from carrying on as they left.
And yet the question remains, since shouting down is expressive even if “thuggery.” Crime?
Yes, they certainly could have been far better mannered, and it likely would have been more effective if they had. As for what would have happened had it been Yeshiva students, your speculation (particularly since you’re anonymous) adds little, as does your (cool story, bro) tale of Sharpton.
So it should be a crime because it strained your sensibilities. That’s pretty much the point.
Would it have been shouting down if they had interrupted him for a total of thirty minutes instead of a total of one minute? How about a total of five minutes? At some point, it’s not a crime because it did not actually disrupt.
By the way, did you notice that one of the slogans one of the people was shouting was an assertion that the speaker was
And yes, shouting him down could be “expressive.” So could sounding an airhorn for an hour, or throwing things of him. That is not the sole measure of whether it is protected speech.
Indeed, the prohibitions on shouting him down, or sounding the airhorn, or throwing things at him are facially content neutral, and thus not aimed at the expressive element — though arguably they are being applied selectively here to attack the expressive element. You don’t lose any DA elections in Orange County by prosecuting Muslims.
By the way, did you notice that one of the slogans shouted was that Oren’s expression was not protected by freedom of speech?
And so . . .
“Michael Oren, propagating murder is not an expression of free speech!
That’s what one of them was saying. Kind of ironic, no?
So: you assert this isn’t “shouting down”, because it was brief. Some of the articles indicate that the defense argued that the total disruption was one minute out of a sixty-minute speech. Would it have been shouting down if they did it for 30 minutes? How about five?
I think that, in light of the brevity of the disruption, that it was a poor exercise of prosecutorial discretion to charge them criminally. I also suspect it was motivated by inappropriate factors, like religion and political disagreement.
That doesn’t stop me from having contempt for people who shout down or disrupt the expression of others.
Would it be free speech, or an attack on free speech, for an anti-bullying-law advocate or a marketeer or a slackoisie to launch a DDOS attack on this site for 1/60th of the day?
Sorry, accidental dual post. Though the first had been eaten.
And I was thinking you were surprisingly fervent about this.
I tend not to feel very comfortable with what I believe to be overbroad crimes and relying on the kindness of prosecutors. But that’s just me.
Nah, it’s be Danielle Citron’s people who shout down anyone who offends their delicate sensibilities. Masculine men don’t scream and cry during someone’s speech. It’s always the feminists and other betas who do that sort of thing. A real man can listen to offensive speech without being overcome with the “holy ghost” – or whatever phantasm that causes people to start shaking when someone says something offensive or disagreeable.
William F. Buckley even advised a bunch of students who considered protesting during Hillary Clinton’s commencement speech at Yale to stop being such whiny punks.
These students who were arrested were petulant whiners. Although it’s true they shouldn’t carry a rap sheet for what they did, it’s also true that there’s nothing admirable about their conduct.
Is it the “holy ghost” or the fear Ann Bartow? Bartow is much scarier.
As a younger guy, I was always amazed at how many adults males lived in fear of feminists. Adult men – the kind of power players that people would step over bodies to get a meeting with – would e-mail approving notes about my posts. Yet these guys would never go against feminists in public. But I digress.
See… masculine men, they drive like this ‘boom-shik-boom-shik’…
Can I just say “You lie!” and write you off as a fucking nutcase?