incitement

On April 6, 1967, William R. Baird delivered a lecture on birth control at Boston University. As part of the presentation, he showed a film, displayed contraceptive devices in their original packages, and at the conclusion invited members of the audience to take contraceptive articles from the stage. A young woman requested and received a package of Emko vaginal foam from Baird, after which he was arrested and charged with exhibiting and giving away a contraceptive device in violation of Massachusetts General Laws, c. 272, § 21. Baird was convicted following a bench trial in the Massachusetts Superior Court. The Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts set aside the conviction for exhibiting the contraceptives on First Amendment grounds but upheld the conviction for giving away the foam by a four-to-three vote. Baird then filed a petition for a writ of habeas corpus in the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts, which dismissed the petition. The Court of Appeals for the First Circuit vacated the dismissal and remanded with directions to grant the writ discharging Baird. The Supreme Court noted probable jurisdiction and heard the appeal brought by the Sheriff of Suffolk County, Massachusetts. The Massachusetts statute, as interpreted by the state courts, makes it a felony for anyone other than a registered physician or pharmacist to dispense contraceptives intended for the prevention of pregnancy, with distribution authorized only to married persons upon prescription.

In the predawn hours of June 21, 1990, petitioner R.A.V., then a juvenile, and several other teenagers assembled a crudely made cross by taping together broken chair legs and burned the cross inside the fenced yard of a black family that lived across the street from the house where R.A.V. was staying. Although this conduct could have been punished under several Minnesota statutes carrying significant penalties, the City of St. Paul chose to charge R.A.V. under the St. Paul Bias-Motivated Crime Ordinance. The ordinance provides that whoever places on public or private property a symbol, object, appellation, characterization or graffiti, including but not limited to a burning cross or Nazi swastika, which one knows or has reasonable grounds to know arouses anger, alarm or resentment in others on the basis of race, color, creed, religion or gender commits disorderly conduct and shall be guilty of a misdemeanor. R.A.V. moved to dismiss the charge on the ground that the ordinance was substantially overbroad and impermissibly content-based and therefore facially invalid under the First Amendment, and the trial court granted the motion. The Minnesota Supreme Court reversed, construing the ordinance to reach only fighting words and concluding that it was not impermissibly content-based. This Court granted certiorari.

Hustler Magazine, Inc., a magazine of nationwide circulation, and its publisher Larry Flynt published a parody of a Campari Liqueur advertisement in the November 1983 issue. The parody featured respondent Jerry Falwell and suggested that his first time sampling the liqueur occurred during a drunken incestuous rendezvous with his mother in an outhouse. The parody included a disclaimer in small print that it was an ad parody not to be taken seriously. Falwell filed suit in the United States District Court for the Western District of Virginia seeking damages for libel, invasion of privacy, and intentional infliction of emotional distress. The District Court directed a verdict against Falwell on the privacy claim. The jury found against respondent on the libel claim but awarded Falwell $100,000 in compensatory damages and $50,000 in punitive damages from each petitioner on the emotional distress claim. The United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit affirmed the judgment. The Supreme Court granted certiorari given the importance of the constitutional issues involved.

In 1968, Chicago police officer Richard Nuccio shot and killed a youth named Nelson. State authorities prosecuted Nuccio and obtained a conviction for second-degree murder. The Nelson family retained petitioner Elmer Gertz, a Chicago attorney, to represent them in civil litigation against Nuccio. Respondent Robert Welch, Inc., publishes American Opinion, a monthly magazine expressing the views of the John Birch Society. In March 1969, the magazine published an article titled "FRAME-UP: Richard Nuccio And The War On Police." The article accused Gertz of participating in a Communist conspiracy to discredit local law enforcement, described him as a "Leninist" and "Communist-fronter," and claimed he had been an officer of the National Lawyers Guild, which it portrayed as a Communist organization involved in planning attacks on Chicago police during the 1968 Democratic Convention. The article contained numerous inaccuracies, including the false implication that Gertz had a criminal record. Gertz had served as an officer of the National Lawyers Guild approximately fifteen years earlier but had no involvement in planning the 1968 demonstrations. He had never been a member of the Marxist League for Industrial Democracy or the Intercollegiate Socialist Society. The managing editor of American Opinion made no effort to verify the charges against Gertz before publication and appended an editorial introduction stating that the author had conducted extensive research. Gertz filed a diversity action for libel in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. The district court ruled that the statements constituted libel per se under Illinois law. After a trial, the jury awarded Gertz $50,000 in compensatory damages. The district court later entered judgment for the defendant notwithstanding the verdict, applying the New York Times standard. The Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit affirmed. The Supreme Court granted certiorari to review the application of constitutional standards to defamation of a private individual.