The Supreme Court on Thursday struck down a federal law that made it a crime to falsely claim being awarded a top military honor, saying the law infringed on the Constitution’s First Amendment protection of free speech.
The court ruling concerned the Stolen Valor Act, under which a California man, Xavier Alvarez, was convicted for claiming falsely in 2007 that he had been awarded the Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest award for valor.

But Alvarez’s attorneys convinced a lower court that his untruths were protected by the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech. And Thursday the Supreme Court agreed.
“Content based restrictions on speech have been permitted only for a few historic categories ... including incitement, obscenity, defamation,” the court wrote in a summary .
“The Act seeks to control and suppress all false statements on this one subject in almost limitless times and settings,” the court wrote. “Permitting the Government to decree this speech to be a criminal offense would endorse government authority to compile a list of subjects about which false statements are punishable.”
Jan C. Scruggs, founder of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, which built the Wall, commented in an e-mail: “The Court has ruled that the First Amendment protects a wide range of obnoxious behavior including this.
“Public humiliation is now the most effective tool to expose the delusional Walter Mittys of American Society,” he added. “Military recruiters are happy to welcome those desiring to be valorous in combat into the Armed Forces.”
Other veterans groups expressed dismay.
“The Veterans of Foreign Wars of the U.S. is greatly disappointed,” the organization’s commander in chief, Richard L. Denoyer, said in a statement. “Despite the ruling, the VFW will continue to challenge far-fetched stories, and to publicize these false heroes to the broadest extent possible as a deterrent to others.”
The case has generated huge interest and divided First Amendment advocates, including the media, and veterans groups, who saw the act as a necessary weapon to discourage what appears to a boomlet of self-aggrandizers.
According to a brief filed by the Veterans of Foreign Wars and two dozen veterans groups, “Pretenders have included a U.S. Attorney, member of Congress, ambassador, judge, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and bestselling author, manager of a Major League Baseball team, Navy captain, police chief, top executive at a world-famous research laboratory, director of state veterans programs, university administrator, pastor, candidate for countywide office, mayor, physician, and more than one police officer.”
The Supreme Court in recent years has been protective of speech rights in several high-profile cases. The court struck down a broadly written law on depicting animal cruelty, upheld the rights of a controversial group that demonstrates at military funerals and blocked a California law that attempted to outlaw the sale of violent video games to minors.
The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and 23 news organizations, including The Washington Post, filed a brief supporting Alvarez to argue that upholding the law would reverse “the basic presumption against official oversight of expression.”