read out age-old means employed by states for securing the
calm course of justice. The Fourteenth Amendment does not forbid a state
to continue the historic process of prohibiting expressions calculated
to subvert a specific exercise of judicial power. So to assure the
impartial accomplishment of justice is not an abridgment of freedom of
speech or freedom of the press, as these phases of liberty have
heretofore been conceived even by the stoutest libertarians. In act,
these liberties themselves depend upon an untrammeled judiciary whose
passions are not even unconsciously aroused and whose minds are not
distorted by extrajudicial considerations."[138] In Pennekamp _v._
Florida,[139] a unanimous Court held that criticism of judicial action
already taken, although the cases were still pending on other points,
did not create a danger to fair judicial administration of the
"clearness and immediacy necessary to close the doors of permissible
public comment"[140] even though the State court held and the Supreme
Court assumed that "the petitioners deliberately distorted the facts to
abase and destroy the efficiency of the court."[141] And in Craig _v._
Harney,[142] a divided Court held that publication, while a motion for a
new trial was pending, of an unfair report of the facts of a civil case,
accompanied by intemperate criticism of the judge's conduct was
protected by the Constitution. Said Justice Douglas, speaking for the
majority: "The vehemence of the language used is not alone the measure
of the power to publish for contempt. The fires which it kindles must
constitute an imminent, and not merely a likely, threat to the
administration of justice. The danger must not be remote or even
probable; it must immediately imperil."[143]

FREEDOM OF SPEECH AND PRESS IN PUBLIC PARKS AND STREETS

Notable also is the protection which the Court has erected in recent
years for those who desire to use the streets and the public parks as
theatres of discussion, agitation, and propaganda dissemination. In 1897
the Court unanimously sustained an ordinance of the city of Boston which
provided that "no person shall, in or upon any of the public grounds,
make any public address," etc., "except in accordance with a permit of
the Mayor,"[144] quoting with approval the following language from the
decision of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court in the same case.
"For the legislature absolutely or conditionally to forbid public
speaking