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by rsync 2023 days ago
"The reality is that certain types of people are in fact more important than others. POTUS gets secret service protection -- something that most citizens won't get."

I'm not talking about that - and I have no problem if judges (or anyone else) have extra bodyguards or special limousines.

I can say anything I like about the president. The same is true for these judges. The equal protection I am speaking of is not what kind of armor their car has, but what I am, and am not, allowed to say to or about them.

1 comments

Go ahead and say anything you like about them. Your political opinions are entitled to the highest order of protection under the 1st Amendment.

There's little reason to say that "X judge lives at Y address" is equivalently deserving of protection. We might choose to protect your saying so out of an abundance of caution, to avoid a slippery slope whereby we restrict too much speech. But the idea they're equivalently valuable things to protect in their own right needs a serious defense.

"We might choose to protect your saying so out of an abundance of caution, to avoid a slippery slope whereby we restrict too much speech. But the idea they're equivalently valuable things to protect in their own right needs a serious defense."

Investigative journalism revealing corruption.

It might not be the address per se but it will be similarly identifying and revealing information about a persons day to day life. This information would be communicated both while reporting the story, between reporters and other sources, etc., as well as exposed in the journalistic product itself.

Or, given five seconds of thought, that was the first, obvious thing that came to mind.

But there you go: you yourself just distinguished it, acknowledging that the address itself isn't what needs to be published in order to preserve society's interest in free publication about corruption.