fighting words
Definitions from Case Law · United States Supreme Court
Definitions from Case Law
From 315 U.S. 568 - Chaplinsky v. State of New Hampshire · 1942Most cited · 4,491 citing opinions
the insulting or 'fighting' words—those which by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace
How often courts cite the case defining “fighting words”
Court decisions citing the opinion that defined “fighting words” — 4,478 in all, by decade. Counts are citations to the defining case as a whole, not verified uses of the term. The dip in the most recent years is a data-coverage gap, not a real trend — our corpus holds fewer opinions from the latest years.