As I’ve argued before, the so-called “objective standard” can be very difficult to administer in this big diverse messy country where we often don’t share a common sense of reality and there is no uniform “reasonable person.”īut for many years, American courts have disagreed on whether there is also a subjective element to the definition of “true threats,” and if so, what it requires.
For more than half a century, courts have used a (purportedly) objective standard to determine whether a threat is true, asking whether a reasonable person, familiar with the context, would interpret the threat as a sincere expression of intent to do harm. Not all threats are “true,” and therefore not all threats fall outside of the First Amendment.
The term “true threats” refers to a subcategory of threats outside the protection of the First Amendment.
0 kommentar(er)
