ABSTRACT
Some townsmen complained to the city marshal that Chaplinsky was denouncing all religion as a "racket". The officer warned him that the crowd was getting restless. Then a disturbance occurred and the traffic officer at the busy intersection started with Chaplinsky for the police station, but Chaplinsky was not told that he was under arrest or that he would be arrested. There are certain well-defined and narrowly limited classes of speech, the prevention and punishment of which have never been thought to raise any Constitutional problem. As construed by the state court, the offense under the New Hampshire statute was limited to words which, when addressed to a person of common intelligence, would likely cause him to fight. It should be noted that fighting words are not the same as libelous or slanderous words. Language may be abusive and insulting and yet fall short of the tests that obtain in the law of defamation.
