Examining Fans" Rights to Jeer at Games John Henson had to put up with Duke's fans on March 3, but he got the last laugh when North Carolina won, 88-70. At a North Carolina State men's basketball game last month, the former Wolfpack stars Tom Gugliotta and Chris Corchiani were ejected from the arena - at the request of a referee - for protesting the officials" calls. Gugliotta and Corchiani were seated behind the scorer's table, and officials from both teams and others seated nearby said neither one used vulgarity or threatened the referees. Matt Campbell/European Pressphoto Agency Fans have several ways of making their feelings known. They can shout at players, as Celtics fans did to LeBron James, above, when he was a member of the Cavaliers in 2010. They were complaining, sometimes yelling, and maybe a bit acerbic. But in a game hosted by a public university, the episode raised a rarely asked question: Is a fan's protest - known in some sports law circles as fan speech or cheering speech - a form of expression protected by the First Amendment? In other words, do fans have the right to bellow at referees all game long, as long as they do not run on the court or menace the officials? Even if the fan is seated in the front row and the referee can hear every word? The question is apparently still open to debate, despite more than 150 years of American public sporting events. Legal experts say few precedent-setting court rulings deny, interpret or establish a fan's right to rail at a referee. Hostile or excessively disorderly fan behavior is not tolerated by security officials at games, or for the most part by the court system, because it is deemed dangerous or disruptive to the group. But in the middle of a sporting event as fervent as the N.C.A.A. tournament, with passionate crowds and high stakes, what exactly defines disruptive? "It isn't yelling or screaming; that is part of the game," said Howard Wasserman, a law professor at Florida International University who has been writing about fan behavior and the First Amendment since 2001. For better or worse, you're allowed to go to a sporting event and express yourself just as you're allowed to go to a political rally and say what you want. When you go to a game, the governing body can control drunken behavior. It can control someone standing up and blocking the view of others. It can control signage if it blocks the view of others. But most views expressed, even loud ones, are protected speech. No one has the right to insist that the game be watched in silence. The debate, like most sports law arguments, is nuanced and complex. Classic public forum free-speech issues, for example, would generally not be applicable at privately owned facilities hosting games, like college basketball games at private universities. Privately owned teams can also contend that a fan's purchase of a ticket is in fact a contract with the team to conform to a code of conduct, which could include a prohibition on excessive yelling at the officials. But many stadiums and arenas constructed with some public financing, or built on state land or land operated by a municipal authority, could be viewed as public entities. In that setting, a government cannot force citizens to surrender constitutional rights like free speech. There is some leeway, but where is the line drawn, and on which side does a fan yelling at a referee stand? "It is an interesting question, and we don't have an exemplary test case that settles every aspect," said Scott Rosner, a sports business and law professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. But traditionally, courts have come down on the side that free speech at a sporting event has limits. It is a right that is revocable - maybe because the few fans that come before courts have really overdone it. Rosner, however, conceded that there could be cases that proved the opposite. He used as a hypothetical example a fan sitting at a Penn State football game and reading loudly from the grand jury report of the Jerry Sandusky sexual abuse case. "Everything about the setting is public," Rosner said. The fan is not doing anything wrong because he's reading a public document, and yet it would likely agitate a lot of people in the crowd and conceivably lead security to remove the fan. And afterward, members of the A.C.L.U. would be lining up to represent that fan. In fact, one fan, Robin Ficker, a Maryland lawyer, gained notice in the 1990s for similar demonstrations. Ficker was a fixture at Washington Bullets games, where he sat behind the opposing team's bench and shouted at players, sometimes through a megaphone. He was careful about his language. He was not asked to leave. On at least one occasion, standing within feet of Michael Jordan, he read aloud unflattering passages from "The Jordan Rules," a controversial book on the Chicago Bull's first championship season. When the Bullets moved to a new arena, the team relocated Ficker, a season-ticket holder, behind the basket, and he declined to attend.