The case the phrase is from was about placing limitations on blatantly political speech. It was a truly reprehensible decision.

"A unanimous Supreme Court, in a famous opinion by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., concluded that defendants who distributed leaflets to draft-age men, urging resistance to induction, could be convicted of an attempt to obstruct the draft, a criminal offense." -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schenck_v._United_States

From it's very inception, that phrase has been used to justify the restriction of political speech. Nothing has changed since 1917, people still use it to argue against political speech to this day.

I did not know this. Thanks for sharing.

Don't be so literal-minded. If you have been following the news you might have noticed some deliberate Ebola hoaxes in the last week, where a man on an aeroplane and another on a bus shouted out they had Ebola and threatened to deliberately infect other passengers and the bus driver, respectively. The fact that nobody was actually hurt in these two incidents doesn't alter the deontological basis for a rule against such behavior.

Is 'shouting fire in a crowded theater' supposed to be figurative now? It used to be offered as the archetypical example.

>The fact that nobody was actually hurt in these two incidents doesn't alter the deontological basis for a rule against such behavior.

Then what possibly could? Hegel's ghost?

Reasoning by analogy is the norm in the American common-law system. If you were to maliciously cause some sort of dangerous stampede at, say, a sporting event, you would not be able to get off the hook by arguing that you were not in a theater. Once more, I urge people to consider the difference between civil and common law systems. A lot of people seem to assume the standards of one apply to the other.

Then what possibly could? Hegel's ghost?

The improbability of anyone being hurt. If you stand in the middle of a public park and yell 'the sky is falling!!' nobody will take you very seriously, but even if they did and decided that it was necessary to run indoors the probability of a stampede occurring is vanishingly low. But maliciously causing panic in an enclosed space significantly elevates the risk of injury to others, because the more panicked people are, the more irrationally and dangerously they may act, a phenomenon for which we have abundant evidence.

Shouting in a crowded theater is not an analogy, it's a benchmark. This seems obvious to me - if it is an analogy, then what does the theater represent?

What it says is that some line has to be set, and this concrete situation described is something that obviously should fall on the other side of the line. (Therefore, people should be imprisoned for speaking out against the war Q.E.D.)

Basically, one can imagine, one would not want someone to invoke panic into others frivolously when it has potential to cause physical harm.

Another example would be shouting "She's got a gun, arhhhh!" in a crowded plazza while setting off some firecrackers.

The firecrackers aren't speech.

What if instead you have an accomplice who's really good at beatboxing?

One could argue that "art isn't speech" as well. It's expression none the less.

Or yelling "I have Ebola" on an airplane.

Is it even illegal to shout "fire" in a crowded theater?

This isn't 1900. There are accessible, well-lit exit routes in every theater I've been in. Not to mention fire suppression systems, alarms, and the fact that you'd most likely see a fire before it was time to panic.

Perhaps this does not happen much in the US. However, there are "discotheque" fires [1] which harm numerous people throughout the world. Typically overcrowded with locked exit doors. It's a sad thing, but it happens.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nightclub_fires

No. It was an example of speech that could have terrible consequences, just like anti-war speech.

edit: You're overestimating the wisdom of crowds and the care of theater owners. Spraying mace in a crowded club led to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_E2_nightclub_stampede

Fear that the Who would start playing early caused https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Who_concert_disaster

We should probably add 'doing a sound check' to 'shouting fire in a crowded theater.'