An individual’s First Amendment freedom of speech may depend on who is listening, says Clay Calvert, Joseph L. Brechner Eminent Scholar in Mass Communication with the University of Florida’s Department of Journalism. And plenty of others are listening.

Calvert spoke to the Levin College of Law on Nov. 10, about his article titled, “Personalizing First Amendment Jurisprudence: Shifting Audiences & Imagined Communities to Determine Message Protection in Obscenity, Fighting Words And Defamation,” which is soon to be published in the Levin College of Law’s Journal of Law and Public Policy.

Calvert holds a Juris Doctor from the University of the Pacific's McGeorge School of Law in Sacramento and a PhD in communication from Stanford University. Now, he uses his education and experience to research and write about first amendment protection as well as to teach first amendment theory and media law classes.

“The nice thing about writing law journal articles is that I learn something. Hopefully, I help somebody out in the process,” Calvert said.

Calvert also discussed past articles he has written, and described his research, conducted alongside Bob Richards, a former colleague from Penn State, as “interview-based.”

Some of Calvert’s and Richards’ most notable interviewees include Larry Flint, of Hustler fame, John Ramsey and his late wife Patsy Ramsey, who filed defamation claims on behalf of their son Burke concerning news reports that implicated Burke in the murder of his six-year-old sister, JonBenét, and Richard Jewell, who was first suspected, then later cleared in the 1996 Centennial Olympic Park Bombings in Atlanta, Ga.

Of his article that will soon appear in the Journal of Law and Public Policy, Calvert said that he was first inspired by a case involving fighting words that he found on www.freedomforums.com. The case concerned a man who was arrested for heckling the police. Calvert described what he sees as “two levels of fighting words.” The first is what he calls a “one-on-one immediate breach of the peace where you are going to hit [someone],” and the other level concerns whether the audience or community to whom it is directed is willing to accept it as permissible speech.

Calvert added that while police officers may be “thick skinned” and have a relatively high tolerance and even expectance of fighting words, public school teachers represent a group that falls on the opposite end of the spectrum.

“Certainly the speech [in a public school] never has to rise to the level of fighting words before you can squelch that speech and punish the student,” Calvert determined.

While the police may be at the highest level in terms of tolerating potentially offensive or provocative speech and public school teachers may be at the lowest level, Calvert described the “fictional reasonable person,” which he deemed to be somewhere in the middle. Such an individual, however, may have a higher or lower tolerance for speech that may be deemed offensive by another individual, depending on a community’s established set of values and principles, Calvert said.

In defamation cases, Calvert explained that “we focus on reputational harm” and that courts must “interpret the message from an average reader’s perspective” and then ask, “what is the meaning that an average person would take away from this? Defining “average” is arbitrary in areas such as Los Angeles, where no socioeconomic background, community, or race, could necessarily be considered the “norm,” Calvert cautioned.

Calvert summarized his presentation by telling his audience that “under the first amendment, we believe that all of our rights are equal, and that we can say whatever we want to whomever we want. [But] the amount of protection depends largely on the individual to whom we say that speech, or who it is targeted or intended for.”