Seeing that societal norms for keeping lies in check are in sad decline, legal scholars are reassessing freedom of speech. One British scholar asserts that receiving valid information is crucial to making decisions affecting personal welfare so as well as a right to free speech, people have a right to not be lied to. At present, the First Amendment protects lies except in commercial speech and defamation, perjury and fraud. Some scholars believe it would be possible, though, to protect our democracy against outlandish lies by banning “empirically verifiable false election speech.” (New York Magazine, November 28, 2022, by Jeff Wise)
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