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Rh falls. Or he may worry that the legal system will err, and count speech that is permissible as instead not. See Philadelphia Newspapers, Inc. v. Hepps, 475 U. S. 767, 777 (1986). Or he may simply be concerned about the expense of becoming entangled in the legal system. The result is “self-censorship” of speech that could not be proscribed—a “cautious and restrictive exercise” of First Amendment freedoms. Gertz, 418 U. S., at 340. And an important tool to prevent that outcome—to stop people from steering “wide[] of the unlawful zone”—is to condition liability on the State’s showing of a culpable mental state. Speiser v. Randall, 357 U. S. 513, 526 (1958). Such a requirement comes at a cost: It will shield some otherwise proscribable (here, threatening) speech because the State cannot prove what the defendant thought. But the added element reduces the prospect of chilling fully protected expression. As this Court has noted, the requirement lessens “the hazard of self-censorship” by “compensat[ing]” for the law’s uncertainties. Mishkin v. New York, 383 U. S. 502, 511 (1966). Or said a bit differently: “[B]y reducing an honest speaker’s fear that he may accidentally [or erroneously] incur liability,” a mens rea requirement “provide[s] ‘breathing room’ for more valuable speech.” Alvarez, 567 U. S., at 733 (Breyer, J., concurring in judgment).

That kind of “strategic protection” features in our precedent concerning the most prominent categories of historically unprotected speech. Gertz, 418 U. S., at 342. Defamation is the best known and best theorized example. False and defamatory statements of fact, we have held, have “no constitutional value.” Id., at 340; see Alvarez, 567 U. S., at 718–719 (plurality opinion). Yet a public figure cannot recover for the injury such a statement causes unless the speaker acted with “knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not.” New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U. S. 254, 280 (1964); see Garrison v. Louisiana, 379 U. S. 64, 74 (1964) (using the same