Ashton v. Kentucky

How courts have described this case

Verbatim parenthetical descriptions written by other courts when citing this decision. Ranked by citation-network relevance.

• holding that Kentucky’s common law crime of criminal libel was unconstitutionally void, as no court case had redefined the crime’s sweeping language in understandable terms, leaving prosecution decisions to be made on a case to case basis
• common law crime of criminal libel, defined by trial court as including \any writing calculated to create disturbances of the peace\
• criminal libel statute construed too broadly at trial. Although the conviction was reversed, a limiting construction in the state courts eliminated the unconstitutional features and saved the statute
• anti-noise ordinance held unconstitutionally vague because it was likely to function erratically
• “Vague laws in any area suffer a constitutional infirmity”
• Kentucky’s criminal libel law held inconsistent with First Amendment

Source: CourtListener parenthetical corpus (CC0).