The False Will Set You Free: How Lower Courts Have Translated the Supreme Court’s Latest Falsity Doctrine into Practice

This study provides the first descriptive mapping of the impact of the First Amendment’s rationale for advancing truth-seeking being extended counter-intuitively to provide greater protection for intentional falsehoods. Scholarly concerns over the Supreme Court’s Alvarez ruling focused on potentially creating a doctrinal vacuum of limited guidance. The study found lower courts reflected more clarity of guidance when cases involved the sorts of historically unprotected categories of false expression targeting harm beyond falsity—but considerably less so in other types of cases where it was often “not entirely clear what level of scrutiny is appropriate for laws that criminalize lying.”