[I'm working on a draft article called When Are Lies Constitutionally Protected?, and I thought I'd serialize it here, since I still have plenty of time to improve it; I'd love to hear your thoughts on it! (You can also read the whole article here; all the posts about it will go into this thread.) I began with a brief discussion of constitutionally unprotected lies, and turn here to constitutionally protected ones.]
[A.] Alvarez
Why then are some lies punishable and others not? The dissent in Alvarez gave a sketch of the argument, and it seems likely the concurrence and the plurality would have agreed. Let's look at the passage in which the "philosophy, religion, history, the social sciences, the arts, and other matters of public concern" passage appears:
[T]here are broad areas in which any attempt by the state to penalize purportedly false speech would present a grave and unacceptable danger of suppressing truthful speech. Laws restricting false statements about philosophy, religion, history, the social sciences, the arts, and other matters of public concern would present such a threat. The point is not that there is no such thing as truth or falsity in these areas or that the truth is always impossible to ascertain, but rather that it is perilous to permit the state to be the arbiter of truth.
Even where there is a wide scholarly consensus concerning a particular matter, the truth is served by allowing that consensus to be challenged without fear of reprisal. Today's...
ST. GEORGE, Utah (ABC4) — A Utah podiatrist and two nurses have been federally indicted on fraud charges after they allegedly submitted fraudulent claims to Medicare for skin substitute services, ...