Does the First Amendment allow complete freedom of speech- the right to say anything you want at any time?

Answer 1

Court cases and other pieces of legislation have decided that there are some kinds of speech that are not protected by the First Amendment, including hate speech, sexual harassment, and personal threats.

Answer 2

Yes it does, but there are some restrictions. Like saying government secrets in public, or if you sign a contract which you are obliged to not speak of certain things. Anything like that restrict your right to speech, but yes the First Amendment gives you the right to free speech.

Answer 3

No. You can't go into a movie theater and yell "fire" when there is no fire. If you make a threat against a public figure or another person the First Amendment doesn't protest you. There a reasonable limits on speech.

Answer 4

The First Amendment is not a blanket right to exclusive freedom of speech. It would simply be chaos had the founding fathers intended everything said to be free from punishment. If we had allowed this, assault, terroristic threats, menacing, perjury, etc would all be constitutionally protected crimes.

"I am going to kill you and blow up this movie theater" would be protected! That doesn't sound very good, does it? No. So through the evolution of the constitution, some exceptions to free speech were created.

There are time, place, and manner restrictions (the constitutionality of such are still under question by many legal experts, even if the Supreme Court has approved them), your speech must benefit some form of public, artistic, scientific, or literary function. Your speech cannot be used to inflict intentional public unrest (you can't stand out on a street corner and convince people to pillage & plunder).

Answer 5

not always, for instance you cannot yell "fire" in a crowded theatre, imagine the stampede of frightened people, they would trample each other to death,.

Answer 6

no, you cannot slander a person

Answer 7

Yes