Golb and the freedom to annoy

THE NEW YORK TIMES ON THE RAPHAEL GOLB CASE: Top Court Champions Freedom to Annoy (John Leland). Excerpt:

The decision on Tuesday was mixed for Mr. Golb, a real estate lawyer who has a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Harvard. The seven judges threw out 10 charges, leaving Mr. Golb with misdemeanor convictions on nine counts of criminal impersonation and 10 of identity theft. The case now goes back to State Supreme Court in Manhattan for resentencing. Without the felony conviction, Mr. Golb can now reapply for his law license.

In striking down the statute on aggravated harassment dealing with speech that was merely annoying or alarming, the judges unanimously ruled that the law was unconstitutionally vague and overbroad. They cited another court’s ruling that “any proscription of pure speech must be sharply limited to words which, by their utterance alone, inflict injury or tend naturally to evoke immediate violence.” Mere annoying speech, the lingua franca of many New Yorkers, was not enough.

This seems to address the concerns raised by UCLA Law Professor Eugene Volokh. Background on the case is at that post, here, and links.