Sexual Harrassment and "Friends"

Civil liberties attorney Harvey Silvergate discusses a recent sexual harassment case in California involving the TV show Friends. He writes:

The protracted battle between the First Amendment and the PC notion that we're all entitled to go through life without being made to feel uncomfortable took an unexpected turn two days ago. The California Supreme Court—a pioneer in curtailing free speech, ostensibly to protect the “vulnerable” from “verbal harassment”—unanimously reversed a lower court decision that would have allowed a sexual harassment lawsuit to proceed to trial against the producers of the sitcom “Friends.”

Read the full column here.

If nothing else, this case shows the extent to which a well-intentioned law—the 1964 Civil Rights Act—can have ramifications far beyond anything the sponsors envisaged at the time.