Talk:Chilling effect/Archive 1

History section needs revision
The section points to Lamont v. Postmaster General as an adoption of the term by the U.S. Supreme Court, but this is misleading. While there is no doubt that the case is about chilling effects, I do not see the actual term "chilling effects" used anywhere in the decision. Moreover, the article currently attributes the "decision" to Justice Brennan, even though Brennan's opinion was only a concurrence. I would recommend deleting the paragraphs about Lamont entirely — they might make sense in a more complete article (and when, you know, made to be accurate), but are awkward and misleading as is. Threepwolfe (talk) 03:44, 28 April 2013 (UTC)

Removed the following text

 * "The landmark California Supreme Court case Varian v. Delfino is a classic example of this chilling effect."

and the commercial link
 * "*Be careful who you SLAPP - A book about chilling free speech on the Internet."

I feel that the SLAPP link is enough on this subject. The rest is a PR campaign by people involved in the case. kmccoy (talk) 07:35, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)

US-centricism
The article is written as though the First Amendment applies everywhere. Could someone recast it? Estrellador* 14:15, 27 July 2005 (UTC)
 * I did a small change to try and help it along a bit in this direction. --Lisa 00:44, 4 September 2005 (UTC)
 * This is a US-law term. Is there any application or use of this term anywhere else in any other non-US area of law? No.  Then, it does not need "globalize". Not every concept is global!  I have added a clarifying comment to the lede to explain that it is a US-specific term.  If and when the term becomes adopted in areas outside the US then we can "globalize" the article entry. Until then we need only explain the use of the term. I would hope we would do the same for other terms of common interest but jurisdictional specificity! --Lquilter 13:50, 2 December 2007 (UTC)

Origin of the term
I feel like I'm stating the obvious here, but the article itself professes ignorance, and no-one else has mentioned it here. It seems to me that this is merely the misunderstanding of a common, older cliche. While it may now have become a proper term in common usage (although I haven't seen it anywhere else), it seems very likely that it would have originated from one or a few people's misunderstanding of a phrase such as, "this would have a chilling effect on free speech." In the previously standard usage, the meaning of this phrase would be that the effect on free speech would be "chilling" (please note the small "c"), in as much as it would be terrifying enough to "chill one to the bones", or to make one shiver involuntarily with fear. If this were a proper term, I would expect it to be named after an entity such as a person, place, or organisation, and therefore also to be capitalised. I'd like to point out that the stated example of usage in the article does not use capitalisation (viz. "Chilling Effect"), increasing the probablilty that this is a simple misunderstanding rather than a legitimate term. --Nezuji 07:42, 20 December 2005 (UTC)
 * I think you are stating the obvious. :); I don't think anybody is seriously suggesting that there is a guy "Chilling", or indeed anything other than the ultimate derivation. But the term I think can be used in caps to refer to the specific usage it has gained over the years. 9/11 may have had a chilling effect on free speech, but the attacks alone could not exercise a Chilling Effect. Anyway, YMMV and IANAL. Sdedeo (tips) 07:54, 20 December 2005 (UTC)

The article says that the term may have originated in the ruling for Lamont v. Postmaster General, but I cannot find the term anywhere in the ruling. I had thought that it was first used by the Court in Dombrowski v. Pfister. Is there anyone out there better versed in First Amendment law who might know definitively?--24.91.134.186 17:34, 12 January 2007 (UTC)

The term definitely did NOT arise in the Postmaster case. It did arise in Dombrowski v. Pfister, 380 U.S. 479 (1965), page 487, also authored by Justice Brennan. The article should be edited accordingly.Krguest (talk) 14:01, 8 October 2010 (UTC)

Neutrality
Hi. Please forgive my lack of Wikipedia understanding. This is my first contribution of any kind at all; and I don't feel confident enough to go ahead and edit this article, yet I think it must be changed considerably.

While I do believe I understand the subject the author is referring to in this article, it is, as another commenter has pointed out, not neutral. I do not fault the author, or question his/her intentions, but I feel this article is not strictly neutral by Wikipedia's guidelines. The subject here is referencing the "Chilling Effect Doctrine" which you can see more on Answers and there is also chillingeffects.org.

However, the phrase -- chilling effect -- is a combination of existing terms: the term "chilling" has been in use since long before the US government; and what's more is that in fact the exact phrase "chilling effect" would have been used to refer to the "chills up the spine" effect a macabre event or scene can have on a person, long before this doctrine.

Whether the doctrine's use of the term "chilling" incorporates the macabre, or in fact just any "cooling" effect, which is seen to lead to slowing down -- as in slowly freezing waters which eventually become completely still -- I do not claim to know; but the article's title is very misleading, as it seems to me that the far more obvious meanings of the phrase are those in the macabre genres.

You can find seemingly limitless sources of such usage in literary genres like mystery and crime or detective stories.

The motion picture director Alfred Hitchcock could be one of the most famous sources for finding this precise phrase and proving that this usage is secondary in notariety to the meaning as would be in reference to Hitchcock's genre -- having nothing at all to do with this subject. Here is an article about Hitchcock that uses this term. This page on the PBS website for the show "Mystery" uses the phrase. This is a mystery book named "Chilling Effect". This horror review uses this phrase.

There will be countless others, dating back centuries for the afficianado.

And there is another aspect that further places this reference lower on the list of potential meanings: there are countless other references to uses of this phrase borrowed also in a wholesale manner from the macabre origin, and used in double-entendre:

A NASA article uses the double entendre referrring to early arctic thaw. A double-entendre used to refer to a shirt that keeps you cool. Another double-entendre about frozen poultry. These double-entendre's absolutely do not refer to the "Chilling Effect Doctrine", but rather to the macabre.

So now, to emphasize what I'm trying to point out: there are three things:
 * 1) The phrase contains the word "chilling" which should have its own de-referenced definition.
 * 2) This precise phrase is far more commonly associated with the macabre.
 * 3) The phrase is used commonly in double-entendre which seems to also warrant an explanation before leading to the "Chilling Effect Doctrine" that is the subject of this article.

I cannot see that this page can be up there with not a single mention of the potential disambiguation from "chilling"; the other usage in the macabre; nor the double-entendre; and it thus cannot claim neutrality. These seem very obvious to me. In fact, alongside the "www.chillingeffects.org" Website, this comes of as being far too un-neutral. Therefore I think it needs to be changed. And the title should likely be changed if it is primarily about this doctrine, and it may still need to refer to the more common usage.

I'll re-iterate that I am not faulting the author, just trying to add as much verifiable information to make this point clear. Others will see it even more obviously than me. I do not know what the correct proceedure would be for me to contribute more to this. I don't actually feel qualified to add authoritative content. And I'm not sure what I would put on the page if I went ahead and edited it. Hopefully this will be helpful to someone who can do more. I also made a note on the "Chilling" page, which also does not mention the macabre. Thanks. -Steven Coco.
 * Hi Steven -- I think your quarrel is not that the article is "non-neutral" (e.g., it only protrays one side of a debate), but simply that it does not discuss unrelated material. However, simply because a phrase is often used does not mean it should be defined and discussed in wikipedia -- see WP:ISNOT, wikipedia is not a dictionary. I don't think you've established that "chilling effect" meaning "something that scares you" is a technical term deserving of inclusion. To put it another way, we don't have a separate entry for "humorous effect", because there is no special meaning of the term beyond what its components suggest. Sdedeo (tips) 21:14, 16 September 2006 (UTC)
 * Hi. Well overall I'm lost; so I have to bow out; but I do see more now...Good luck. -Unsigned

United Kingdom
I haven't made this edit myself, as my knowlage on the subject is limited, but I do know that the Chilling Effect is part of common law in the UK. As I study media law, we have touched upon the subject but only briefly. If no-one else makes the edit I will do some research and update the article in future. Monkeymox (talk) 11:52, 2 May 2008 (UTC)
 * Please take the liberty to add what you know. ChyranandChloe (talk) 02:54, 18 June 2008 (UTC)

Category
I think it is necessary for this article to belong in a category. Because of its relationship to law, it has been categorize as such. It may be possible to find a more appropriate category, if you do please change it. ChyranandChloe (talk) 02:51, 18 June 2008 (UTC)

Libel only?
This term could describe other things too. For example obscenity which censors erotic works such as writings or drawings of a pornographic nature, or laws outlawing sexual depictions of fictional characters. Tyciol (talk) 07:34, 29 April 2009 (UTC)
 * I believe that the term is used broadly, but you'd have to find a published reliable source that asserts this. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:34, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

SLAPP
About this, it seems to imply that a chilling effect is solely a lawsuit-oriented issue, and I'm not sure that chilling effect is limited to lawsuits. "If I express my real views on ______ political issue, while are different from my employer's, then I might lose my job" also has a chilling effect. "If I publish my results, I'll be villified and never get funding again" also has a chilling effect. Consider, e.g., the way these sources use it:     WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:09, 15 June 2009 (UTC)

Examples needed.
I see kmccoy removed a specific court case because he felt it was just propaganda, but I do feel the article needs examples to clarify the subject. I'm not an idiot, but after reading the article, I'm still not sure what it means (or how it just plain differs from censorship). I suggest simple hypothetical examples that will show what speech by whom is being chilled (by someone else?). --Yoda of Borg (talk) 09:36, 19 December 2010 (UTC)

Intention to edit
As sugested above I plan to do some editing to this article for a course that I'm taking at the University of Toronto. I'd like to add some of the missing citations, include some examples either hypothetical or from leading cases in the area, and maybe add some additional explanation of the concept. If anyone has additional suggestions, I'm happy to hear them. Emilymarian (talk) 02:37, 19 October 2011 (UTC)

non-legislative chilling effects
I would suggest that the phrase chilling effect in law has also been used with regard to executive action. If you write an email or a letter and find aggressive police on your doorstep, you are less likely to exercise your first amendment rights. If a judge misuses his control of the courtroom to jail people, this also can have a chilling effect. The article, as currently written, focuses only on the legislative arena at present. That's just not consistent with general usage which concerns abuse emanating from any branch of government at any level. TMLutas (talk) 06:21, 2 June 2012 (UTC)

US Constitution
I've noticed that the US's system of law is the primary basis of this article, necessitating the change to the Globalize tag. Although it has been previously argued that "Chilling Effects" are a US term, the concept is prevalent in other legal systems and this article ought to at least cursorily address this concept in an international perspective. Dtlyng (talk) 02:01, 1 May 2013 (UTC)

Requested move

 * The following discussion is an archived discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review. No further edits should be made to this section. 

The result of the move request was: page moved. Unanimous consensus after eight days of listing. &mdash; Amakuru (talk) 20:38, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

– Rationale: this article is the most prominent topic for this title, and it should be titled "Chilling effect" without the parenthetical disambiguation. A hat note should direct users to the disambiguation page at "Chilling effect (disambiguation)". —Swpbtalk•contribs 13:23, 9 July 2013 (UTC)
 * Chilling effect (law) → Chilling effect
 * Chilling effect → Chilling effect (disambiguation)
 * Support. Chilling Effects receives twice as many page views, but is not in competition for this title. Apteva (talk) 19:31, 9 July 2013 (UTC)
 * Support, but definitely have a hatnote for both wind chill and Chilling Effects. Red Slash 09:20, 10 July 2013 (UTC)
 * Support, clear primary topic for this specific title. bd2412  T 22:12, 11 July 2013 (UTC)
 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page or in a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

It looks like we need a history merge for Talk:Chilling effect (disambiguation) and Talk:Chilling effect so that this talk page can be matched up with its old article. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:55, 24 July 2013 (UTC)