In a recent Justia blog post, Dean Vikram David Amar and U.C. Davis Law professor Alan Brownstein discuss what responsibilities, if any, universities and municipalities have in regards to preventing the "shouting down" of controversial speakers.
"In our view, while the government may have no obligation to regulate or prohibit such oral interference (with an important caveat discussed below), a properly crafted law to prevent it would be constitutionally permissible, and not necessarily a bad idea.
"...The issue isn’t whether obstruction (of which shouting down is one kind of a broader category of interference) must be prohibited by government (it needn’t be); the issue is whether government can, if it chooses, regulate obstruction (which we think it can). That is why universities could (and perhaps should) do more than issue 'unenforceable' civility guidelines; they can promulgate binding anti-obstruction regulations that can be enforced against those who are shouting down speakers.
"In the balance of this column we explore in more depth exactly why such regulations would be permissible, and how courts should analyze them."
Read the full post on justia.com.