Unprotected Categories of Speech

Fighting Words - words in a face-to-face exchange in the form of personal insults or epithets which are likely to cause the average person to whom the words are addressed to react violently. Fighting words do not include political statements that the hearer finds deeply offensive to his or her beliefs.

Obscenity - to be obscene, material must:
(1) be a work that the average person, applying contemporary community standards would find, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest; and
(2) the work must depict or describe, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable obscenity law; and
(3) the work, taken as a whole, must lack serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value.
An example of a law that satisfies the second requirement is a statute that define obscenity as limited to “patently offensive representations or descriptions of ultimate sexual acts, normal or perverted, actual or simulated.” A second example is a definition that includes “patently offensive representations or descriptions of masturbation, excretory functions and lewd exhibition of the genitals.”

3) True Threats - defined as “statements where the speaker means to communicate a serious expression of an intent to commit an act of unlawful violence to a particular individual or group of individuals.”

4) Child Pornography -  visual depictions of actual children engaged in sexual activity or the lewd exhibition of the genitals. Unlike in the case of obscenity, “A trier of fact need not find that the material appeals to the prurient interest of the average person, it is not required that sexual conduct portrayed be done so in a patently offensive manner; and the material need not be considered as a whole.”