ABSTRACT
On April 25, 1977, a group of Holocaust survivors stood before the Board of Trustees of the Village of Skokie, Illinois. The survivor group spoke out because the National Socialist Party of America (”NSPA”), a small Chicago-based Nazi group led by a redoubtable provocateur, Frank Collin, had announced its intention to hold a pro-NSPA and white power demonstration at Skokie’s village hall on May 1, 1977. During the 1960’s and 1970’s, however, the Supreme Court altered the fighting words doctrine to make it consistent with the emerging doctrine of content neutrality in order to protect the speech rights of protesters in the public forum. The Skokie decisions were the result of a free speech jurisprudence that is excessively libertarian in the sense that it treats the act of political expression in the public forum in isolation from its context, intent and impact.
