Scientific Speech: Existing First Amendment categories are inadequate
Scientific Speech
Christopher P. Guzelian, 93 Iowa L. Rev. 881 (2008)
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Traditional First Amendment categorizations of speech content, entrenched as constitutional precedent through many cases and decades, fail to reflect the three fundamental philosophical categories of speech content: scientific speech, historical interpretations, and viewpoints. In particular, courts ignore or grossly mishandle questions of what First Amendment protection to give scientific speech. This constitutional mistreatment of scientific speech–a considerable fraction of all speech content–suggests that structural infirmities may exist within the First Amendment’s purportedly stable core. In this essay, we identify scientific speech’s unique, knowable attributes not shared by the two other kinds of legally relevant speech. We then advance a novel argument: some instances of false scientific speech (i.e., misleading scientific opinion) are theoretically subject to liability under existing First Amendment law or its logical, predictable extension. We also preliminarily examine the merits of First Amendment and other legal defenses to scientific-speech suits.