If you actually get into a physical fight with another person in a public place, you can be charged with disturbing the peace and battery. Under California Penal Code Section 242, battery is a misdemeanor punishable by up to six months in county jail and a $2,000 fine.

The fighting words doctrine allows government to limit speech when it is likely to incite immediate violence or retaliation by the recipients of the words.

Fighting words are, as first defined by the Supreme Court (SCOTUS) in Chaplinsky v New Hampshire, 315 U.S. 568 (1942), words which “by their very utterance, inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace.

These include the lewd and obscene, the profane, the libelous, and the insulting or “fighting” words — those which by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace. Thus was born the fighting words doctrine.

United States. The fighting words doctrine, in United States constitutional law, is a limitation to freedom of speech as protected by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. In 1942, the U.S. Supreme Court established the doctrine by a 9–0 decision in Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire.

Fighting words refer to direct, face-to-face, personal insults that would likely lead the recipient to respond with violence. The U.S. Supreme Court placed a key limitation on fighting words in the celebrated free-speech decision Cohen v. California (1971). …

Can you hit a girl back if she hits you? Report Abuse You can only use force against a person in order to protect yourself from bodily harm. If you can easily back away from the danger, you must do so. So if the woman is no immediate danger to you after the first blow, you can not hit her back.

In this case if the person says that he is going to breathe, or touch, or spit on you than he is threatening to assault you, but if he stays over six feet away from you and doesn’t come any closer, if you run at him and punch him in the face it is probably not justified and you can yourself be charged with assault.

The fighting words doctrine, as originally announced in Chaplinsky, found that two types of speech were not protected—words that by their very utterance inflict injury, and speech that incites an immediate breach of the peace.

Hitting a girl, or any person, in America is called “battery” under the law and is illegal. Threatening to hit someone is called “assault,” and is also illegal.

The Fighting Words Doctrine. Though the clause protects most speech, the Court ruled that the free speech clause only protects speech that has a considerable amount of social value. Generally speaking, if the social value is outweighed by the harm to society, such as breaching the peace, then the speech is not protected by the First Amendment.

The “ fighting words ” exception to the freedom of speech is widely misunderstood and abused by college administrators. This is, in part, due to the twisted legal path that the doctrine has been down over the last six decades. The original fighting words doctrine was born out of Chaplinsky v.

These include the lewd and obscene, the profane, the libelous, and the insulting or “fighting” words — those which by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace. Thus was born the fighting words doctrine.

It now seems clear that lewd, vulgar, or profane speech doesn’t fall within the fighting words exception. But someone forgot to tell college administrators, who continue to try to use the fighting words doctrine to punish and censor students. This is probably because the Supreme Court has never expressly overruled its holding in Chaplinsky.