The Universal Principles of Free Speech

On the whole, I come down on the universal side. It's a matter of not having enough faith in your fellow citizens and being too worried about what the consequences would be. As far as the question of riots is concerned, this is known in the United States' legal arguments as the hecklers veto. All a group has to do to stop somebody from speaking is to threaten to riot. And so the first response of the state has to be to stop the riot, or to put the speech in a venue where it can be protected. Those are things that states can do.