One Click to Suicide

Abstract

Websites counseling dangerous activity such as suicide represent uncharted legal territory. To date, most legal scholarship regarding these sites considers whether they incite imminent lawless action. As an alternative to incitement, this paper argues that these websites are more productively characterized as instruction manuals that aid and abet unlawful activity. In support of this approach, this paper proposes a three-tiered legal test for distinguishing between protected and unprotected instruction manuals under the First Amendment.