"either to stop talking or to get off the sidewalk whenever a patient came within 15 feet". In a concurring opinion to Mahanoy Area School District v. B.L. (2021) dealing with regulation of off-campus student speech, Justice Samuel Alito likened the ability of schools attempting to punish students for speaking out against the school as a form of a heckler's veto. Outside of law Heckler's veto is often referred to outside a strict legal context. One example is an article by Nat Hentoff in which he claims that "First Amendment law is clear that everyone has the right to picket a speaker, and to go inside the hall and heckle him or her—but not to drown out the speaker, let alone rush the stage and stop the speech before it starts. That's called the 'heckler's veto.'" In Hentoff's formulation, the heckler him or herself is the party which directly carries out the "veto" and suppresses speech. This runs counter to the legal meaning of the phrase. Note that, to a lawyer familiar with the First Amendment law, the phrase "heckler's veto" means something different from what the plain English interpretation of the words suggests. In First Amendment law, a heckler's veto is the suppression of speech by the government, because of [the possibility of] a violent reaction by hecklers. It is the government that vetoes the speech, because of the reaction of the heckler. Under the First Amendment, this kind of heckler's veto is unconstitutional.'" University of California, Irvine Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky invoked the concept in an editorial following a protest, in which students disrupted a speech by the Israeli ambassador Michael Oren. Chemerinsky explained that broad freedom exists to invite speakers and hold demonstrations, but that once a speaker has begun an invited lecture, The District Attorney, Dan Wagner, who brought criminal charges against the protestors similarly argued that the protest amounted to a heckler's veto. Michigan State University professor of political science William B. Allen has used the phrase "verbal terrorism" to refer to the same phenomenon, defining it as "calculated assault characterized by loud side-conversations, shouted interruptions, jabbered false facts, threats and personal insults". See also Cancel culture Feiner v. New York Fricke v. Lynch Gregory v. City of Chicago National Socialist Party of America v. Village of Skokie References Citations Sources External links The Troubling Resurgence of the 'Heckler's Veto' A series of citations