Walter Chaplinsky, a Jehovah’s Witness, was distributing religious literature on a busy Rochester, New Hampshire, street. After local residents complained that he was denouncing all religion as a “racket,” City Marshal Bowering warned Chaplinsky that the crowd was becoming restless. Later, amid a disturbance, Chaplinsky encountered Bowering and called him a “God damned racketeer” and “a damned Fascist,” adding that the Rochester government consisted of Fascists or their agents.
New Hampshire charged Chaplinsky under a statute prohibiting offensive, derisive, or annoying words or names addressed to another person in a public place. A municipal court convicted him. After a new jury trial in the state superior court, he was again found guilty, and the New Hampshire Supreme Court affirmed. Chaplinsky argued that the statute violated the Fourteenth Amendment by infringing freedom of speech, press, and worship and by being unconstitutionally vague. The trial court had also excluded evidence about his religious mission, alleged police misconduct, provocation, and the truth of his statements.
Issue #1
Whether New Hampshire’s statute, as construed to reach face-to-face words likely to provoke the addressee to violence, violated the freedom of speech protected against the states through the Fourteenth Amendment.
Holding
No. The statute constitutionally punished “fighting words,” including Chaplinsky’s personal epithets to the city marshal.
Reasoning
The Court began from the settled proposition that the Fourteenth Amendment protects First Amendment speech rights from state infringement. But it emphasized that freedom of speech is not absolute in every setting. Certain narrow categories of expression, including obscenity, profanity, libel, and insulting or “fighting” words, have historically been subject to punishment without presenting a constitutional problem.
“Fighting words” are words that, by their very utterance, inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace. In the Court’s view, personal abuse and epithets are not a meaningful contribution to the exchange of ideas and have too little social value to outweigh the state’s interest in public order and morality.
The New Hampshire Supreme Court had given the statute a limiting construction. It did not permit punishment merely because a listener personally found speech offensive; instead, it covered only face-to-face words that a person of common intelligence would recognize as likely to cause an average addressee to fight. The Supreme Court accepted that authoritative state-law construction.
So narrowed, the statute prohibited specific verbal conduct within the state’s power to punish: personally directed words in a public place that plainly tended to provoke violence by the person addressed. The Court concluded that the phrases “damned racketeer” and “damned Fascist,” directed at Marshal Bowering, were classic provoking epithets likely to prompt retaliation and a breach of the peace.
Issue #2
Whether Chaplinsky’s claims of freedom of the press and free exercise of religion independently invalidated his conviction.
Holding
No. The case involved spoken epithets, not press activity, and cursing a public officer was not an exercise of religion protected from enforcement of a valid criminal law.
Reasoning
The Court treated free speech as the only constitutional freedom directly implicated by the conviction. Chaplinsky was prosecuted for spoken words, rather than for distributing written religious literature, so the freedom-of-the-press claim did not provide an independent basis for relief.
The Court likewise rejected the free-exercise theory. Even if Chaplinsky’s earlier street preaching and literature distribution were religious activities, those activities did not immunize accompanying conduct that violated a valid criminal statute. The Court could not regard cursing a public officer as religious exercise in any relevant constitutional sense.
Issue #3
Whether the statute was unconstitutionally vague and indefinite under the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Holding
No. As authoritatively limited by the New Hampshire courts to words with a direct tendency to provoke violence, the statute gave constitutionally sufficient notice of the conduct it punished.
Reasoning
The state court’s construction supplied an objective standard: the law reached only words that ordinary people would understand as likely to cause the average person addressed to respond with violence. It therefore did not leave criminal liability to the unpredictable sensitivities of a particular listener.
Because the statute was carefully confined to fighting words and similar disorderly verbal acts that threaten public peace, the Court concluded that it was sufficiently definite for criminal enforcement. Chaplinsky had adequate notice that personally directing the charged epithets at the marshal was prohibited.
Issue #4
Whether the Constitution required the state court to admit evidence of provocation, alleged police neglect, or the truth of Chaplinsky’s accusations.
Holding
No. Whether those facts established a defense or mitigated punishment was a matter of state law, not a federal constitutional question in this case.
Reasoning
The Court held that the exclusion of this evidence raised no federal constitutional objection. Once it determined that the statute was valid on its face and constitutionally applied to Chaplinsky’s words, the availability of provocation, truth, or mitigation as defenses remained for the New Hampshire courts to decide under state law.