The First Amendment Does Not Protect Lying

In several different situations I have found that there is a debate on whether the First Amendment protection of free speech protects the individuals right to lie. This question has come up in relation to politicians making political speeches, corporations and advertisements, and defamation laws.

There is some things that we in the United States have to agree on in order to have a coherent and functional government. One of those is the Rule of Law. According one precept of the rule of law the law has to be clear and coherent and understood by the vast majority of the people it regulates. A second precept is that everyone even the judge who judges by it is subject to it. The practice of law of this Country is based on the Declaration of Independence in that it declares natural law as fact. Natural law was defined in several philosophical and legal works the those that unanimous approved the Declaration of Independence were aware of.

One of these works is John Locke’s “The Second Treatise On Civil Governments”. In the second chapter of the aforementioned work he stated that the right to liberty does not justify license. So knowing this and that the founders of our country wrote it into law when they stated “we hold these truths to be self evident” we can apply it to the Bill of Rights whose purpose is to protect those rights from the government oppression. Since the right to speech is an aspect of the right to liberty it reasonably follows that the rules that apply to the later also apply to the earlier. The logical conclusion in knowing all of this is that the right of speech does not include the right to lie. Thus since this is so it follows that any judge whom rules otherwise is either lying or mistaken, or in other words corrupt or incompetent.