Law professor believes government’s speech power needs more control

[cyberswede]

Law professor believes government’s speech power needs more control

The First Amendment guarantees the freedom of speech to all Americans, but that doesn’t mean you have the absolute right to say anything you want. There are limits, as Oliver Wendell Holmes famously noted when he wrote you can’t yell fire in a crowded theater.

Unless you’re the government, in which case there are no limits. Randall Bezanson, a professor in the University of Iowa College of Law, is concerned such unlimited power poses a threat to everyone else’s speech and thinks a change in law is needed to hold government speech in check.

“The government’s duty is to facilitate the marketplace of political expression,” Bezanson writes in his paper “The Manner of Government Speech.” “Individuals may promote political falsehood, or racial hate, or unleash passion in the service of destruction; the government should not.”

The doctrine that gives the government unlimited speech rights has been in place since a 1991 Supreme Court decision, but Bezanson said it has “metastasized” since into something that creates a forum where the government is the only speaker and can prevent messages that contradict its own. This goes against the spirit of the First Amendment, he said, which was designed to limit the speech of governments at all levels in order to expand an individual’s freedom of speech.

Read the rest: http://news-releases.uiowa.edu/2010/september/092710government_speech.html