Re Bankruptcy: Early in my career I was dispatched to bankruptcy court in an effort to save the personal injury & wrongful death judgments my firm had secured at trial against a particularly sleazy asbestos products manufacturer. After having lost at trial, the company filed an appeal but never posted a bond for the judgments, and almost immediately thereafter filed for bankruptcy. The company had tens of millions in assets that it was siphoning off to other entities in what very clearly appeared to be fraudulent transfers to avoid paying creditors. Not one, but two federal judges were on the bench and proceeded to kick my ass around the courtroom, telling me my motion was "anathema to the purpose of bankruptcy law." I said, "Your Honors, I admit to not knowing much of anything about bankruptcy law, but I do know when my clients are getting screwed over." And that is apparently the purpose of bankruptcy law, as my motion was summarily denied.
Re Freeze Peach: 1) Please stop with the "fire-in-a-crowded-theater" thing. It is a century-plus-old trope that was never the law and was only a bad analogy in an even worse case (US v Schenck, 1919, restricting rights to anti-war protest) that has long since been superseded by a standard of "incitement to imminent lawless action" (Brandenburg v. Ohio, 1969).
2) There is a significant difference between governmental limitation of expression based on content (broadly impermissible) and defamation (libel and/or slander), which is a civil wrong to an individual, who can be compensated for any harm caused (and proven) by false and defamatory statements. In the United States, it is almost impossible to defame a public figure. Private individuals, who have not sought the public spotlight, can succeed in seeking damages, which is now the sole issue in the Alex Jones/Sandy Hook trial.
ETA:
Apparently
24 states have criminal defamation laws, which are most probably unconstitutional as a violation of the First Amendment. From the ACLU site (send them money):
The Supreme Court imposed significant restrictions on criminal defamation laws in the 1960s, but in states that still have criminal defamation laws on the books, public officials have used them to prosecute critics. For example, the editor and publisher of a small newspaper in Kansas were convicted of criminal defamation after the paper published an article suggesting that the mayor lived in another county and was therefore ineligible for public office. A Massachusetts woman was convicted of criminal defamation in New Hampshire after she claimed that a coffee shop’s employees spit in police officers’ coffee. And a Kansas man was charged with criminal defamation after he posted a yard sign criticizing his local government’s inaction on a water drainage problem.
Freedom of speech doesn’t give anyone the absolute right to spread malicious lies about people, but civil lawsuits are fully capable of addressing the harms caused by defamation. Several states have repealed these unconstitutional laws in recent years, and the remaining ones that still have them on the books should follow suit.
