Free Speech Zones Aff
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1AC – BiopowerBy regulating appropriate "space and time," free speech zones make any student protest meaninglessCrocker 7 [Thomas Crocker (Assistant Professor, University of South Carolina School of Law. J.D., Yale; Ph.D., Vanderbilt), "Displacing Dissent: The Role of "Place" in First Amendment Jurisprudence," Fordham Law Review, 2007] AZ Because where we speak is often just as important as what we say, increased efforts by the government to restrict the location of speech threaten to undermine the guarantees of the First Amendment. The Supreme Court's current free speech doctrine permits the imposition of reasonable time, place, and manner restrictions on speech without raising constitutional concerns. 7 Government officials have seized upon this doctrinal permissiveness to develop practices that suppress and control the content of speech by regulating the place of speech. Such suppression and control is most (in)visible in the case of political dissent. Dissent or political protest is expressed most effectively in public, especially at places where government officials-above all the President-appear. To convey a message of dissent is to convey no message at all if it is spoken where no other persons-much less the targeted government officials-can hear or see the message. It is precisely this aim-the elimination of dissenters' ability to appear as dissent to specific audiences-that has been the object of much recent regulation. Regulation of place has stifled political dissent by creating special "protest zones" at presidential appearances, 8 by deploying free speech cages at national party conventions, 9 and by designating large areas of urban centers as "restricted zones."10 More generally, officials control or displace speech by establishing university "free speech zones,"' I limiting mass protests such as those in New York against the Iraq War,12 and restricting use of sidewalks, 1 3 malls, 1 4 and airports. 15 The simple regulation of place has made dissent effectively invisible, practically pointless, and criminally dangerous. For example, when President George W. Bush visited Columbia, South Carolina, in 2002, Brett Bursey sought to welcome him with a sign that read "No War for Oil.' 16 Standing among others who were waiting to greet the President without messages of dissent, Bursey was ordered by officials to remove himself to a designated protest zone three quarters of a mile away and out of sight of the President. 17 When he refused, he was arrested, charged with violating 18 U.S.C. § 1752,18 and later convicted of violating Secret Service restrictions on a person's presence where the President is temporarily visiting. 19 Bursey was not singled out simply because he wished to convey a message of dissent, but because he wished to convey a message of dissent in a particular place and in the presence of other persons standing along a roadway to greet the President as he passed. By the simple regulation of place, government officials succeeded in suppressing dissent.20 Many commentators lament the decline of the public sphere brought about by the increased organization of modem life.21 Quite apart from rising concerns over security, modem life has diminished the role of traditional places where the public might gather and mingle, such as town greens, parks, sidewalks, and pedestrian streets.22 Justice Anthony Kennedy has noted this problem: "Minds are not changed in streets and parks as they once were. To an increasing degree, the more significant interchanges of ideas and shaping of public consciousness occur in mass and electronic media."'23 Although the Internet provides a vibrant new forum for discursive practices, there is a countervailing worry that the ability to select content to an ever more refined degree will lead to greater social fragmentation. 24 Moreover, the Internet does not provide for serendipitous occasions to encounter others face-to-face or to discover the new or the strange in both a social and public setting.25 Trends of modem life and government regulation of public fora have led to the disappearance of meaningful public discourse, dissent, and protest from the public sphere. Thus, the combination of the physical displacement of traditional public spheres with the strategic disruption of political protest provides ample reason to question whether the bland treatment of place in the Court's current First Amendment jurisprudence appropriately protects, let alone enables, the values of free speech. Zoning is reminiscent of the McCarthy Era and the faults of COINTELPRO – repression cloaked in the law – and gives authorities the power to construe civil disobedience as domestic terrorism, especially in this post-9/11 era.Mitchell 03 - Don Mitchell, Distinguished Professor of Geography at Syracuse’s Maxwell School: 2003 (“The Liberalization of Free Speech: Or, How Protest in Public Space is Silenced” Stanford Agora Vol. 4 p.43-45 Available at agora.stanford.edu/agora/volume4/articles/mitchell/mitchell.pdf Accessed on 12/11/16)IG As the preceding argument has indicated, the liberalization of free speech has not always been progressive. And it has not been progressive in both senses of the term. It has not marched steadily forward, uninterrupted, towards the shining light of freedom, to become ever more liberal, ever more just. Rather, to the degree it has been liberalized, this has occurred in fits and starts, with frequent steps backwards or to the side rather than forward. Like any social history, that is, the history of free speech is not a linear one of ever-expanding enlightenment; like any social history it is a history of ongoing struggle. Nor has it been progressive in the sense of necessarily more just, as a close focus on the geography of speech makes clear. Geographical analysis has shown that what sometimes appears as a progressive reinforcement of a right to speech and assembly is really (or is also) in fact a means towards its suppression.169 Nonetheless, whatever rights have been won, have been won through struggle and often not by following the law, but by breaking it. Civil disobedience, by labor activists and other picketers, by civil rights marchers, by anti-war protesters, and by Free Speech activists (as with the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley in the sixties), has forced often illiberal theories of speech and assembly to be reconsidered. But against these struggles has to be set a history of governmental recidivism: the Palmer raids and Red Scare of 1919-1920, the Smith Act of 1940, the McCarthy era, and the antics of COINTELPRO in the 1960s and 1970s, are just a few of the more well-known moments of repression, often cloaked in law and justified as urgent “legitimate state interests” at a time when serious challenges were being made to the “established order” or when other exigent factors induced panic within the government and the public at large. The history of speech and assembly, that is, can be told as an on-going struggle against recurring illiberalism.
Within six weeks of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Congress had passed, and the President signed into law, the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001 (USA PATRIOT Act).170 Among its many provisions, the Act defines as domestic terrorism, and therefore covered under the Act, “acts dangerous to human life that are in violation of the criminal laws,” if they “appear to be intended … to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion” and if they “occur primarily within the territorial jurisdiction of the United States.”171 As Nancy Chang argues: Acts of civil disobedience that take place in the United States necessarily meet three of the five elements in the definition of domestic terrorism: they constitute a “violation of the criminal laws,” they are “intended … to influence the policy of a government,” and they “occur primarily within the territorial jurisdiction of the United States.” Many acts of civil disobedience, including the blocking of streets and points of egress by nonviolent means during a demonstration or sit-in, could be construed as “acts dangerous to human life” that appear to be intended to influence the policy of a government “by intimidation or coercion,” which case they would meet the crimes remaining elements…. As a result, protest activities that previously would most likely have ended with a charge of disorderly conduct under a local ordinance can now lead to federal prosecution and conviction for terrorism.172 As the space for protest has become more and more tightly zoned, the likelihood that laws will be broken in the course of a demonstration – a demonstration seeking to “influence a policy of government” – increases. And, of course, the very reason for engaging in a demonstration is to coerce, even if it is not to directly “intimidate.” One should not be sanguine about the “or” placed between intimidate and coerce. It means just what it says: coercion or intimidation will be enough for prosecution.173 Now even civil disobedience can be construed as an act of terrorism. The intersection of the new repressive state apparatus being constructed in the wake of September 11 with nearly a century of speech and assembly “liberalization” portends a frightening new era in the history of speech and assembly in America. We may soon come to long for those days when protest in public space was only silenced through the strategic geography of the public forum doctrine. Directory: file -> view view -> Western Europe after wwii view -> Author study: paul fleischman view -> Qpa1 7ela study Guide view -> Arctic Oil/Gas Neg view -> November 1970 Approximately 150,000-500,000 deaths Bhola Cyclone Bangladesh view -> Grade Level: 6 Unit of Study: Caribbean glce view -> Citation: Duffield, Katy view -> Table of Contents Lesson # view -> Chinese Wind Energy Disad Download 1.19 Mb. Share with your friends:
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